The ENO tragedy

My production of Die Valkyrie at ENO - 2002

The latest NPO announcements were, to say the least, drastic, and there's inevitably been a lot of very vocal reaction.  It's perhaps unfortunate that so much attention has been paid to the ENO being cut, given that so many other decisions were also very impactful. However, I'm not going to apologise for yet another blog post about the ENO, because 1) it's one of the national companies and so it absolutely deserves to be debated and 2) I have skin it this game.  

I first worked with ENO back in 1998, as Assistant Director on Nicholas Hytner's famous Xerxes: a production that I've since been able to revive both at the Coliseum and in the USA. The next year, I assisted Peter Sellars on Nixon in China: and so began a friendship which has been immensely beneficial to Border Crossings. Peter has been our Patron for years, and a very active one, giving talks both in person and online, as well as offering me an artistic sounding board.  I also worked with Deborah Warner, Phyllida Lloyd (a lot!), Calixto Bieito, Atom Egoyan....  I worked with conductors who taught me how to work with music, and singers whose ability to act through the voice made me understand a whole new layer of performance.  A lot of the protest about ENO's de-funding has focused on this aspect of the company - that it develops younger artists who go on to "make wonderful international careers" - but that surely isn't the point of public subsidy. The point of public subsidy is that the work is good in and of itself - and much of what we did in the first years of the 21st century was, I believe, exceptional. I remain incredibly proud of having directed the entire Ring cycle for the company, in a staging that made sense of the text's complexity and nuance, while acknowledging its elemental power and its simultaneously mythic and human scales. 

I know that's a subjective judgement, all the more so because it's a judgement on something I directed myself. But this actually goes to the heart of the problem, which is that it's very difficult to assess the quality of art, and theatrical art perhaps most of all. Because theatre is ephemeral, you can't be wise after the event. If you produce the theatrical equivalent of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, and get the same response he did, there will be no future critics able to re-assess your genius after you've lopped your ear off. There was a time when "artistic quality" was the main measure by which the Arts Council evaluated organisations, but it proved too slippery for government, too subjective, too unquantifiable. As a result, the main criteria by which the arts are assessed, and therefore financed, have become politically volatile - with results the ENO and others are now experiencing.  

Under New Labour, the arts were instrumentalised as a catalyst for social change. Long before #BlackLivesMatter, there was a strong emphasis on supporting artists from minority backgrounds, particularly if their work was also seen to be reaching audiences from those same backgrounds. This funding priority is still significant in cultural policy, although it now sits alongside other criteria, added during the period of Tory rule that began in 2010. Encouraging arts organisations to develop as businesses is a really significant aspect of this. Think, for example, of the Catalyst programme (which we went through): a politically motivated initiative encouraging artistic companies to learn from the American model of private philanthropy, with little understanding of the very different cultural context in the US.  Think also of the consultancy firms who have been moving in on larger organisations, restructuring, prioritising and measuring the deliverables. Rishi Sunak feels like the obvious person to emerge as Prime Minister in response to recent cultural history - but it's not because he's the first Asian to lead a UK government, so much as the first person with an MBA. 

Before his arrival Boris Johnson and Nadine Dorries had thrown one more policy consideration at the Arts Council in the form of the "levelling up" agenda, and that has been of huge importance to the most recent NPO round. It sounds laudable enough in theory - the idea was presumably that deprived areas (also known as former "Red Wall" seats) should be offered cultural opportunities to match wealthier parts of the country. The problem is that this self-evidently requires more funding for culture, not less. The only way the beleaguered Arts Council could allocate more money to some localities was to offer less to others. London was particularly targeted. A cynic might point out that London, with its exceptional theatre and opera, voted overwhelmingly Remain and is almost entirely Labour. And that the cultural provision and the politics of empathy are deeply connected.

The irony of all this in relation to the ENO is that the company had actually been very good at responding to the winds of political change. There are far more Black artists and staff there. They have exceptional access schemes and educational provision for young people. Their NPO bid actually included a proposal for a new arm of the company, called NEO, to tour outside London. And they got the consultants in...  of course they did.

One aspect of the NPO decisions that has not received the attention it should is how few of the organisations now funded are actually led by artists. It used to be a given that any arts organisation existed to follow an artistic vision, and that vision was provided by an artistic leader. Not any more. Most major organisations are now led by Executive Directors, who may not have the public profile of the Artistic Director, but are in fact senior to them, and make the key decisions. Art is now subordinate to "business sense".  

So here's another irony in relation to the ENO. As Mark Wigglesworth (a former artistic leader at the company) pointed out in his excellent piece for the Guardian, ENO did what it was told and asked the consultants McKinsey to help solve the financial challenges posed by an earlier cut. The logic of the response made sound business sense - do less opera so your costs go down. As Mark says: "The idea that you could expect the same amount of taxpayers’ money for doing less of the kind of work that required it was clearly problematic." There are other possible solutions, of course. There could be more productions like my Ring: done on a smaller budget, focussing on the acting and the music. The bizarre idea that a "successful" production is one that survives for thirty years could be jettisoned in favour of a theatrical approach which responds quickly to the historical moment of performance: and this would also serve to distinguish ENO more clearly from the Royal Opera, to which it has come to seem a sad second best, rather than a genuine alternative. But these are artistic decisions, and they need artists to make them.  Sound business sense will not make art.

I hope the ENO may somehow survive - of course I do. But if it doesn't, and that seems likely, then the crucial lesson for the sector is NOT that we need to become more business savvy, but that we need to become more imaginative, and to recognise that our organisations exist to support artistic visions - not the other way round.  

Well done Tessa

Tessa Ross

It takes a brave person to step down from what could be considered the top job in British theatre within a few weeks of taking the reins.  Tessa Ross is clearly a brave person.  We don't know the ins and outs of her decision to leave, but we know it seems pretty amicable, and that both she and Rufus Norris felt that the model of a Chief Executive supervising the Artistic Director just wasn't working.

It's a model that the National sneaked in.  When Norris was announced as Nick Hytner's successor, the general sense was that he would be Director of the National in the same way that the previous five had been - the person at the head of the organisation, leading it artistically, with the administrative staff reporting to him.  The senior post arrived with no fanfares, but senior it was.  This has happened with disturbing regularity in recent times, particularly but not only in larger organisations, presumably because boards have been feeling that in the age of Osborne business acumen is what keeps arts organisations on track.  "Balances the books".  The extreme of this is the ENO board's response to being placed in special measures by the Arts Council: hiring as Chief Executive a seconded management consultant with no arts experience at all.

They could not be more wrong.  When an arts organisation does well - by which I mean produces work of quality and significance which excites and builds audiences - it is always because of the vision of the artist who makes the work.  An artistic leader does not always operate in direct relationship to the work - Nick Hytner programmed seasons with plenty of other directors involved - but it is always the result of an artist's vision and ideas.  When an arts organisation does badly - by which I mean produces work which is dull and loses the interest of the audience - it is usually because they are trying to "be more commercial", to "give the audience what they want", to be led by commercial rather than artistic considerations.  What audiences actually want is to be surprised and inspired.  Which is not something you can do with a business plan.

The ENO's troubles do not come from a poor business model.  They come from a crisis in an art form that does not currently know how to respond to the 21st century, and which needs a new creative drive if it is to flourish.  Business planning and sound financial management are all well and good - but they have to serve artistic ideas, rather than dictating them.

Tessa Ross is not a management consultant.  She was OUDS President when she was a student, and started her career as a director.  She's been a very successful film producer.  So, at a guess, she could see that what was needed at the National was real artistic leadership, which is something that in the end has to come from a real artistic leader.  I think she's done a brave and noble thing, and I hope the Arts Council and the boards of arts organisations take note.

We might also apply the same model to the election.  Everyone is talking about their ability to manage and to "balance the books".  Nobody is talking about their vision for the future.  Where, oh where, have real leadership and imagination gone?

An Evening with Peter Sellars

Peter Sellars

A great start to 2015 for the Border Crossings Laboratory - with our Patron Peter Sellars giving an inspiring talk to a packed house at Rich Mix!

Peter's talk, like Rustom Bharucha's a few months ago, was a way for us to interrogate, expand upon and share some of the key ideas which are informing our work.  So we started with a discussion of the relationship between Greek myth and contemporary warfare in the Middle East: the parallel we used in This Flesh is Mine, and which Peter has also employed in productions like The Children of Herakles, The Persians and Ajax.  The Children of Herakles seemed particularly interesting for us, as it combined the presentation of a classical Greek tragedy with the presence of real refugees, both on stage as a silent Chorus, and in the framing events, engaging directly with the audience.  It's always of interest to us - and at times a challenge to us - to find direct connections between our community engagement work and our artistic productions (however obvious the indirect connections may be).  Peter talked about the way in which the presence of the refugees in that show served to interrogate the performance, to measure it against the reality of lived experience; while at the same time the performance also gives that experience an imaginative dimension.  So it becomes a two-way traffic.

Greece is also a wonderful model, because its drama was part of the brief but powerful flowering of democracy in Athens.  As Peter pointed out, even this wasn't an ideal time if you happened to be a woman, a slave, a foreigner or a child....  and yet, as a result, the title of every Greek play is the name of a woman, or of a group of slaves, or foreigners, or children.  Theatre became the way to give voice to the voiceless.  That should remain its function today.

The Children of Herakles

The Children of Herakles wasn't just a performance.  In fact, Peter was very explicit that he's become more and more interested in creating the context for a performance - to the extent that he now gives that every bit as much attention as the performance itself.  In this piece, the evening started with a debate about refugee issues.  It was only 30 minutes long - deliberately not enough time to do the subject justice or to resolve anything.  But this means that the audience go into the performance provoked, thinking about the current situation, and so activated and alive to possibility.  And, after the performance comes the meal, which is then followed by a film about refugees.  The meal is crucial, because that is the opportunity for people to engage directly with individual refugees and to hear their stories and their views.  Peter being Peter, he was able to bring ministers and mayors to break bread with the stateless.

Listening to these ideas was very helpful to me in thinking about our forthcoming Origins Festival, which also needs to be a meeting place and a space for dialogues between people who would not normally meet.  It's no accident that Peter has devoted much of his career to Festivals.  What's more, he also has a powerful interest in indigenous cultures - another subject he discussed that evening.

He embraced the secrecy.  For a lot of Western people who approach indigenous cultures, the element of secrecy is a frustration, or a "challenge".  There is an assumption that, eventually, if we keep applying our scientific and anthropological curiosity, we will break through and learn.  But that is not how indigenous cultures work.  Certain knowledge is not open, but is preserved and treasured as the private property of the culture, known only to certain elders, and shared only as needed.  And, to Peter's mind, that is crucial to the cross-cultural dialogue, because it forces the Westerner, if they have real respect and regard the indigenous people as their human  equals, to adopt a position of unaccustomed humility.  We have to acknowledge that we may never know, and that it is not our decision whether or not we will learn.

Peter's next production is The Indian Queen.  Its opening is about the invasion of the Americas - an attack on the indigenous:

"Wake, Quivera, wake, our soft rest must cease,

And fly together with our country's peace;

No more must we sleep under plantain's shade,

Which neither heat could pierce nor cold invade;

Where bounteous nature never feels decay,

And opening buds drive falling fruits away."

The Gospel According to the Other Mary

As people who've been reading this blog for a while will know, I should declare a bit of an interest in the operas of John Adams.  I first got to know Peter Sellars by assisting him on Nixon in China at the ENO.  That led to me reviving that piece, both there and in Athens, and to Peter becoming the Patron of Border Crossings.  His presence in London has given us chance to catch up a bit about the company's activities, and I've been able to pick his teeming brain.  So, if I sound almost insanely enthusiastic about the new opera that Peter has created with John, you could be forgiven for thinking that I am biased.  But somehow, I think it's more than that.  I think this is a very, very important work.

At the Millennium, Peter and John created a piece about the birth of Christ - El Nino - the radical idea being to look at what it was actually the 2000th anniversary of....   That piece combined the Biblical narrative with contemporary texts, mainly from women writers in Latin America.  The Gospel According to the Other Mary has many similarities: this time the women's voices are more from the US itself (apart from Rosario Castellanos), and this time the narrative is the Passion.  Given that Peter has recently staged both the St. Matthew and St. John Passions - he knows the story.  But it's one thing to explore classic works that draw off a Christianity that was shared by the society from which they sprang: it is quite another to create a new piece of sacred music theatre for a globalised age in which religious belief is at best marginalised, at worst viewed with scorn and derision by the "rational" intellectual establishment, headed by Richard Dawkins.  But it is the logical development of all that Peter and John have been doing for years.  Even Nixon, which appeared on the surface satirical and driven by the news agenda, slowly melted into a profound and complex meditation on death, the transience of human life, and the constant potential for renewal contained in both spiritual and political processes - indeed, it made a powerful case for the regeneration of the political through the spiritual.  The Death of Klinghoffer, their piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was similarly informed, and in some ways resembled a Bach Passion in its structure.  It comes as no surprise to learn that Alice Goodman, the librettist of these earlier pieces, is now a Church of England priest.

If I have one criticism of the new work, it is that I miss Alice's voice.  The libretto, assembled by Peter as a collage of texts, is certainly rich and resonant, but perhaps lacks the sense of a narrative drive and cohesion that both the music and the production have in spades.  It's something we address all the time in our own work - how do you balance unity and diversity, the power of authorship with the acknowledgment of the multiple voice?

Which said, Alice's absence from the project allows it to admit the voices of some other truly extraordinary women, and in particular the indigenous voice, which has long echoed in Peter's work, and of course is crucial to our own through the Origins Festival.  The libretto includes texts from Rosario Castellanos, who spent much of her life working with the indigenous people of Chiapas in Mexico - the same indigenous people who have gone on to lead the Zapatista rebellion.  It also includes the poetry of Louise Erdrich, whose Native American voice is at once brutally honest and deeply engaged with the natural world.  For indigenous culture, concepts like resurrection, which westerners find laughable, are built into the workings of the world.  And so the resurrection sequence of this Gospel begins with the fact that the spring regenerates the world.  In Louise's words:

"The tiny frogs pull their strange new bodies out of suckholes."

The indigenous voice, and other voices of the marginalised, serve to locate this Gospel alongside social activism in the contemporary world.  There are allusions to drug rehabilitation, to the bonded labour of Hispanic migrant workers in the US of today, to César Chávez and the United Farm Workers' 100-mile march.  There is the presence of African-American street dance - an art form of urban protest if ever there was one.  The Mary of the title is an amalgam of Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany - but what matters about her is not so much that she is Mary as that she is Other.  It is at the edges of society - where people have lost everything, where there are no daily comforts to sustain the illusions through which life is endured in late capitalism - it is there, this opera asserts, that the miracle can occur.

And the miraculous, in this opera, is not merely metaphysical or disembodied.  There is a constant erotic charge in the piece - related both to Mary's self-destructive aspects (Louise Erdrich again:

"I will drive boys
to smash empty bottles on their brows.
I will pull them right out of their skins.
It is the old way that girls
get even with their father -
by wrecking their bodies on other men." )

and to the intimations of redemption offered by Jesus.  I had worried when I heard that Jesus was never seen as a character - this could very easily go into Ben-Hur style "Let us not approach the sacred" - but in fact the production constantly plays with the whole idea of incarnation as expressed in performance, with the singers shifting in and out of "character", each being doubled by a dancer, and frequently taking the words or presence of Jesus into other bodies.  This means that you get a very strong sense of his living, embodied presence - in fact more so than you would if he were played by a single performer.    The sexual charge generated between Mary and the various manifestations of this living and dying body are incredibly forceful in both the music and the staging - especially in the colossally talented New York street dancer Banks.  What is evoked in this energising of the space between bodies is the presence of logos - not in the Authorised Version's sense of "word", but as Erasmus more accurately translated it - "the conversation".  "In the beginning was the conversation....  the conversation was made flesh and dwelt among us".

In this production, music, the body, set and light are all in constant motion.  As in life, nothing every stops.  It evolves.  And so we receive an incredibly powerful sense of a grace that does not dwell in a received and immutable doctrine, but in the vibrant interchanges between distinct and diverse beings, alive in thought and word and breath and body.

Reviving Xerxes

A few musings on my recent experience, reviving Xerxes at the ENO.

Xerxes -  Rhian Lois and Andrew Watts

To revive means to give new life.  As revival director for the ENO’s classic production of Handel’s Xerxes, my job was to give new life to a piece of theatre originally made in 1985.  Judging from a show of hands on the first day of rehearsals, that’s before about a third of the people working on it were even born. 

In the case of Nicholas Hytner’s Xerxes, the task of reviving the production is made all the more complex by the specific significance it had 29 years ago.  At that time, Handel was still thought of primarily as a religious composer, known mainly for his oratorios, The Messiah in particular.  He also tended to be seen as a German composer, even though he spent most of his working life in London and ended his days an Englishman.  The rediscovery of Handel as an operatic composer in the 1980s, and his appropriation into the canon of English opera, was largely a result of this iconic production, which elides Handel’s music with an English translation in the style of Restoration comedy (brilliantly done by Nick Hytner himself, often sounding close to Congreve); locates the story in a version of Handel’s own London, with the exotic world of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens inspiring the setting; and so places Handel – quite literally, in the form of his statue from Vauxhall – at the centre of the English national operatic stage.   1985 also marked Handel’s 300^th birthday: the whole undertaking was characterised by a sense of his admission to the canon and commemoration as a national musical hero.  And the production is so very “English”, with its tea and cakes, its bowls and topiary, its redcoat soldiers and prim morality.

The England of 1985 was in a self-assertive mood, led by Margaret Thatcher, whose Falklands campaign had recently marked a resurgence of imperialist jingoism.  During the 80s there was a distinct nostalgia for Empire: as Salman Rushdie noted, in the aftermath of the Falklands we suddenly saw a rush of novels and TV series about British India: Jewel in the Crown, The Raj Quartet, David Lean’s film of A Passage to India.   At the V&A, the English galleries were re-vitalised, with a central place being given to the statue of Handel from the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. 

Viewed from 2014, things look rather different.  British imperialism, and English assertiveness are no longer on the agenda.  A few days after we opened, the last vestige of the Georgian Empire teetered on the edge of disappearance, as Scotland voted on independence (Xerxes, it’s intriguing to note, was written just seven years before the 1745 Scots rebellion against the Hanoverians).  Thatcher said that she would never talk to the IRA: this year, the Queen shook hands with Martin McGuinness.  Nicholas Hytner’s tenure at the National Theatre has reflected a nation in doubt about its internal identity and its place in the world: his first production as the National’s director was a blistering Henry V, our national epic deconstructed and questioned against the background of the neo-imperialist invasion of Iraq.  At the current moment, I could not simply re-stage Nick’s Xerxes exactly as it was in 1985.  It had to be a darker, more disturbing piece; centring on a young King whose acquisitiveness towards Empire, objects and women is both his drive and his downfall. 

The politics of gender have also shifted dramatically in the last 30 years. Xerxes remains a gender-bending opera – but Boy George and Marilyn are no longer the key icons of the queer movement.  In the age of Eddie Izzard, Grayson Perry and Conchita, the “man who sings like a woman” could not simply be a self-pitying character, but becomes assertive and powerful.  Elviro’s disguise offered new possibilities around queer ambiguities, and some freshly minted jokes. 

None of these shifts in perspective and tone undermined the production – it was still very emphatically the classic piece of work that sits at the centre of the ENO repertoire.  The hedge-clipper still popped up, the busts were smashed.  Rather, my work in rehearsals was about allowing the performers to live within that powerful framework, and in order for them to live – for the performance to be “live” – they have to be fully present in the current moment.  Without that immediate presence, that awareness of the current context, a performance is dead. 

That’s the same word ENO technical staff use when a show is taken out of the repertoire: “It’s dead.”   Nobody would want that to happen to Xerxes.  After all, it’s only 29 years old.  That’s far too young to die.

Calixto's Forests

Forests

Calixto Bieito - the bad boy days....  I was there.  Even now, everything written about Calixto's work  still refers back to his ENO work, almost a decade ago: A Masked Ball (that's the one with the toilets) and Don Giovanni (sex and violence more generally).  I was his assistant director on both shows - and I also wrote the dramaturgical pieces for the programmes.  Today, as at the time, I have no idea what all the fuss was about.  I'd already directed my own Don Giovanni - so I knew that for the 21st century this had to be a piece about sex, violence, death and religion.  What else do people think that piece is about?  To my mind, Calixto's main achievement was to recover the comedy.  Masked Ball was a brilliant transmogrification, shifting the questions around radical political change into the era of the Spanish transition.  It wasn't really about toilets.

Anyway - nice to see him back on the British stage, and nice to see Christopher Simpson acting for him (Chris was B in Double Tongue - the play I directed just after working with Calixto on Giovanni).  Forests has elements of the old enfant terrible about it - although these days Calixto is pushing 50, so maybe he's just terrible now.  I felt very aware of his middle age throughout the piece: there's a sense of an artist dealing with mortality, aware that his moral fury is futile, a kind of tiredness buzzing underneath all the characteristic energy.  It speaks to those of us who work in culture and who value humanity at the present moment - it draws off our disillusionment, the existential challenge of carrying on our attempt to live well in a world which so clearly and decisively denies that aspiration.

Much has been made of Calixto's Shakespearean collage of a text - and it's quite fun in a sort of crossword-puzzle way.  But it's not about Shakespeare.  It's not really about the text either - except perhaps the language as music.  Rather the work unfolds through a series of extraordinary images and contrasting energies, unravelling rhythmically like the movements of a symphony.  At times the acting is very generalised - perhaps that's an inevitable side-effect when there are no characters and the text is only an approximation to the mood - and so some of it can seem trite.  Youthful enthusiasm takes up a substantial amount of time at the start...  but the latter sections, dealing with the nightmare world we have made and the fact that somehow we have to come to terms with dying in it - these are extraordinary.   

Dr. Atomic

Alaknanda, Iona and I went to see the ENO production of John Adams' new opera the other night. Dr. Atomic - about Oppenheimer. When I say new, it actually isn't that new... Peter Sellars was working on the libretto, and John on the music, when we were working together on Nixon in China at ENO several years back. I remember talking to Peter about the research he was doing, and the political context in which the atom bomb was created. The thing which has stuck in my memory from those conversations was the degree to which the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were unrelated to the war against Japan, which was essentially won anyway, and were in fact motivated by Truman's need to demonstrate US supremacy to Stalin. There are hints of this in the opera - we keep hearing about the imminence of Potsdam as Oppenheimer tests the bomb - but it isn't highlighted, and I rather wished it was. The opera is very much about torment and moral angst - but I didn't really get the sense of what the moral dilemma really was: things were so weighted towards the horror of the bomb that you were left wondering why anybody would want to make it in the first place. A stronger sense of the political imperative would have made the drama more powerful.

Which said, it's an incredible piece. The libretto moves between reportage and poetry, with lengthy quotations from Donne, Baudelaire and the Gita. And the music similarly moves between the lyrical and the rhythmical, with an astonishing climactic orchestral passage as the bomb is finally tested.

I don't understand why they didn't get Peter to direct it - which I had thought had been the plan. The production feels very lame to me - there's very little sense of how to use stage space. The director's background is TV, and, while she did a very good TV version of The Death of Klinghoffer, this lacked focus. But the music was so fantastic that I didn't really mind!