Beyond the horizon

The Opera Group has been touring new opera for ten years. Two years ago we looked at the impact of our touring model: whilst the company’s artistic work was widely praised, our productions weren’t engaging large audiences or leaving a lasting legacy. We have always believed that opera must relate to our time and place, and that our stories should connect to the landscape of contemporary culture.
When composer Elena Langer and poet Glyn Maxwell wanted to explore a set of musical ideas around memory loss, and specifically about Alzheimer’s disease, we leapt at the opportunity to develop a new way of working. We decided to curate projects with partners from beyond the arts world to build a stronger context for our work with the aim of increasing its impact. The thinking was that we could support the artists researching the subject, as well as collaborate with unusual partners to build the broad networks of local relationships needed to engage bigger audiences.
 

With this project, we were lucky to find the ideal partner in the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London. We researched the opera by observing the work of the scientific and clinical teams at Kings and were inspired to see that the opera could have a role in reflecting stories back to the dementia care and science communities, so offering those communities a space for emotional reflection.
Through the Institute of Psychiatry, the Alzheimer’s Research Trust Network and Oxford Playhouse we shared our work-in-progress with potential ambassadors who we hoped would, having experienced the seriousness of our engagement with the subject and the power of our art-form, be able to talk to their local communities and help us build a network of relationships around each of our touring venues. The feedback from the work-in-progress audiences informed the composer and librettist in the writing of the piece. It also opened a number of doors; a County Council offered to organise respite care to enable carers to attend the opera; the Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Research Trust Network agreed to work with us to curate a range of discussion events including symposia for professional audiences as well as public awareness raising events; the Centre for Arts and Humanities in Health at Durham University agreed to work with us to evaluate the project and measure long-term impacts.
The resulting opera, ‘The Lion’s Face’, just ended its tour at the Royal Opera House and has been seen by our largest-ever audience. We plan to develop the model in 2011 with a new opera by composer Luke Bedford, set in a world affected by climate change and resource scarcity. Our partners include Friends of the Earth, Green Alliance and the Institute of Creative Technology at De Monfort University. By building relationships and networks beyond our own small world, we are finding ways to engage with a broader public in richer way.