On perfectionism and performance

So, you might have noticed if you've been paying attention that it's been really quite a long time since I last posted here.

Why is that?

It's because I've really liked the things I've written previously. I've been proud of them. I've felt like they've said what I needed to say; shared something important about why I perform the things I perform in the way I perform them.

And I've felt like anything I write next might not live up to that expectation.

Whose expectation is it?

Well, it's my expectation, isn't it. It's one of the oldest cliches in the book - you are your own worst critic.

Everyone who writes about performance writes about perfectionism eventually. About the ways in which it holds you back. Waiting for a perfect blog post to be writable, waiting until you are good enough to perform that aria, holding back when you sing because you are scared of the ugly sounds you might make if you go for it... all of these things stop art from happening. 

And we all know that. It's not a new thing to say.

When you are rehearsing or practising, you are seeking after a perfection that will never exist. You are always working to make things better. And you can always see the steps you would take to make things better than they are now; better, perhaps, than you are capable of.

If you don't have that drive, you never get to be good enough to do this stuff at all. You never learn to write well enough that you can actually express what you mean. You never learn to sing well enough that people actually want to listen. You don't improve. You stagnate.

And in the other direction? There's stagnating mire in that direction too, is the trouble. You get bogged down in the performance that might be, the platonic blog post, and you end up not saying or singing anything at all. 


Which is not a new thought. Other people have said it. Perhaps they've said it better.

But it's still a thought worth saying.

We've got just over a week to go until show week. Things are messy. It's not right yet. We haven't practiced enough. There are problems we haven't solved yet.

And that's ok. And you know what, telling you is ok too. We often pretend that what you get - a performance - sort of appears, fully formed, on show night. We don't talk about the week before, when nothing is working and there's too much to do to fit into the time left and you fear that this time, this time is going to be the time when it isn't all right on the night.

I sang in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at the National Theatre when I was fourteen. I remember a bit of staging that didn't work until two nights after opening night. There was a picnic blanket that was supposed to get unfurled, to music, as part of a scene change. (While dancing some Ceighleigh steps, and singing an arrangement of a folk song that finished on a top C, just incidentally). And it didn't work, and it didn't work. We called that scene change 'the Crannock Roll', because the new scene was set in Crannock Bay, and we were supposed to unroll the picnic blanket. And I remember it getting referred to as 'the Crannock Flop' on press night. Because that was what the blanket did. It didn't unroll. It flopped. And everyone was very unhappy about this. It looked clumsy, and awkward, and everybody worried about it.

And then, two nights after opening night, someone figured out a way of doing it that just worked, and we ran with it, and nobody ever worried about the Crannock Flop again.

Except that's not true, is it? Because I still remember it to this day, more than ten years later, not being able to unroll that picnic blanket in a graceful enough fashion.

And! And of course the punchline is that when I finally saw the show, some number of months later with an alternative cast - that scene change was over in approximately five seconds, and there's no way,  no way, that that picnic blanket could have caused the show to flop. No way.

The details matter. Was it a better show with a graceful unfurling of the picnic blanket than with a saggy awkward flopping unroll? Surely. Yes.

The details don't matter at all. Will the unfurling of that picnic blanket be anyone's abiding memory of that show, except, perhaps, mine? Surely. No.

So - this is where we're up to, at the moment. The picnic blanket is flopping. There's stuff we haven't got together yet - and some of it is bigger than a five second scene change - and it's alright to tell you that. Because on show night, this is the things, either we'll have figured it out, or it won't matter.

Performance is about imperfection.

Everyone who performs knows that.

Everyone who performs finds it hard to believe that.

The moment when your voice cracks with emotion, and someone in the audience tears up at the rawness of it.

The moment when you gesture in anger, and the button flies off your costume in a way you could not have choreographed in a million years if you'd been trying.

The moment where you realise, gods damn it all, the picnic blanket doesn't matter. Surely, now, more than ten years down the line, we can all acknowledge that the picnic blanket doesn't matter, right?

You don't control a performance. You certainly don't control an audience reaction.

It's messy, and it's terrifying - and it's worthwhile.

So come and see the results! Less than a week to go. Buy your tickets here: https://kingsheadtheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873483456/events

And by 'the results', I mean: come see the next step in the process. Come see the flaws, and the failures, and the magic that turns them into theatre.

We're not the National Theatre. We can be honest with you. It might be messy. The picnic blanket may flop. And that's ok.

Inspiration

Today, the Guardian published this piece about conductor Jose Antonio Abreu and his network of community choirs, orchestras and music groups, known as El Sistema.

The success of an enterprise like this is hugely inspirational to me, and I would love to see Better Strangers touch the lives of women in Britain in this exact same way - creating a network of mentors, safe spaces and hope across the country.

Music is such a powerful thing.

How to enjoy opera on a budget

I am privileged enough to have been born into a family that could afford to take me to the opera. Not often, but we could usually manage once or twice a year. Most people can't do that. Certainly, I'll hiss with poorly concealed envy at anyone who can afford to get a seat at the Royal Opera House on any kind of regular basis. This branch of the arts is not popular at least partly because no-one can afford to see it in the first place.

However, interesting things are happening to the world of opera at the moment. Let's have a look at ways you can enjoy it on stage or screen, without breaking the bank. I'm afraid this post is only relevant to the UK, but it would be well worth you checking around for similar options near you if you're not local.

Live Broadcasts

Isn't web streaming brilliant? We can use it to explore new music, learn how to make things, and, of course, watch concerts live from miles away. This summer, The Guardian is streaming six performances live from Glyndebourne, with its video of The Cunning Little Vixen remaining online until June 22^nd. At the end of last month, a giant screen was erected in Trafalgar Square to show the Royal Opera House's production of La Boheme (further screenings are planned right up until mid-July). Local cinemas in the UK hold regular screenings recorded from the Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan and many others. It's not quite the real thing, but this writer reckons opera is best enjoyed in performance.

Fringe Stagings

If you know where to look, there is a vibrant and exciting operatic fringe in the UK. Smaller theatres often play host to small-scale, inventive productions of works both well-known and not often heard. Following the success of Opera Up Close at the 2011 Olivier Awards, the opera fringe is better exposed and populated than ever before. Tickets can be on the pricey side, but still a fraction of what you'd pay to get into a large opera house. And some of them will even let you take your pint into the show.

Listings of all sorts of classical music events can be found at bachtrack.com.

Music School Productions

Most music schools will put at least one major opera each year, and these are a fantastic opportunity to take in a show and get a glimpse of the talent of the future whilst you're at it. Many conservatoires and music schools have fully equipped theatres on the premises, so they'll not hold back on the spectacle unless they have to. And music schools, like most higher or further education establishments, have clubs and societies, so it's worth keeping abreast of any less official groups who put on performances. Our friends at En Travesti have been one such group.

Amateur Productions

The quality of an amateur performance can be pretty variable, but amateur shows can be great for getting a feel of the atmosphere, the story and the music attached to an opera. Again, it can also be a good way to scope out emerging talent. If nothing else, you can guarantee that the cast will be having a jolly good time.

Research!

Even the larger companies will put on public shows, special offers, competitions, or give space to new writers and emerging talent. It's a question of keeping your ear to the ground so that you know when they come up. Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds are great for hearing about this sort of thing as soon as it's announced – otherwise, local radio stations may well also put out announcements about them. It's also well worth joining mailing lists for theatres, companies and opera houses you'd like to go to, as you might find you can get early-bird tickets that way.

It's definitely worth saving up to go to the Grand Opera at least once in your life. But in an age of lightning technological advances, real-time networking and, yes, austerity, getting a flavour of the wonderful world of opera isn't as hard or as expensive as you might think.

Got any more suggestions? Comment and let us know!

Pearl-clutching and contemporary arts criticism

A month ago, Jessie and I took our seats in the Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House for Exposure: Opera, a set of "snapshots" from new operas in various stages of completion. Also with us was my mother, who knows her repertory opera rather well - and who, incidentally, is largely responsible for my career ambitions as they currently stand.

As anyone would expect, the output was hugely variable. Jessie and I were particularly taken with Luke Jones' cabaret-jazz influenced A Fetus In America; my mother, with an excerpt from Raymond Yiu's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, made all the more exciting by the influence it drew from Chinese music and literature; and all of us loved the stunning vocal harmonies of Marc Teitler's Sea Shanty, the heady portrait of a famously unsettled writer in Elfyn Jones' The Trial of Jean Rhys, and the unsettling dual narrative of Jamie Man's Kenny and Taiye.

None of these works was perfect. Indeed, we're not even certain any of them are anywhere near completion, or whether they will ever make it to the stage, though we certainly hope so. But, since Better Strangers still holds the ambition of commissioning its own new works, we found the evening inspiring and hopeful, and left full of ideas for the years to come.

Which is why I am slightly alarmed by the media's reception of Judith Weir's Miss Fortune, which premiered at the Royal Opera House's main auditorium last week.

Judith Weir is dear to both of our hearts. Her art songs have challenged us both over the years, and we look to her as a prolific and current example of a female composer. We've been chattering excitedly about going to see Miss Fortune in the coming weeks since that evening at the Linbury Studio, and I know that I desperately wanted it to succeed. Not just because of Judith Weir, but because of the soaring optimism we felt as we left Exposure: Opera. Because of that reinforcement of what we'd known all along - that opera isn't dead, or even sleeping.

We haven't seen the production yet (though we'll certainly talk about it on here as soon as we do), so I'm prepared to allow for the possibility that Weir has work to do on the music and libretto yet. The Guardian's review contains some excellent constructive criticism from someone who has even seen the score. The work was also unfavourably received by critics at Bregenz last year. The opera itself is what it is.

It is not, however, is wholly representative of all new composition, which is where The Telegraph's review tries to place it. It is not conclusive proof that all non-repertory opera is worthless.

"Opera is the only artistic arena in which good money is regularly thrown after bad."

During the editing process for this post, I showed it to my dad, who said "This is reminiscent of some of the crap that was thrown at Pinter when he first started out." A quick check of Wikipedia shows that he is referring to inital critical responses to The Birthday Party, now one of Pinter's best known works.

Indulge me in following the reviewer's vision of an acceptable artistic process, using his same example of Harvey Weinstein's films. Yes, films use data gathered in focus groups to anticipate what their target audience might want to see. How infallible is this policy? How much "good money" went into Scream 4, for example? Or the (admittedly impeccably polished) turd that was Nine? The Brothers Grimm? Yes, Weinstein has some excellent titles to his name. He also has some awful ones, which he made because he thought they'd sell. I don't know how often we, the artistic community, have to repeat this, but commercial viability and artistic excellence are not the same thing. Michael Bay is living proof of this. Half of the popular music Top 40 is proof of this.

Furthermore, what would a focus group in the opera world look like? Who decides what an acceptable audience sample would be? Would it be the same middle-aged rich white people, bored executives and  music students that normally fill the Opera House's auditorium? Would it be geared towards audience development? Would the result be derided as populist, and therefore inferior, as so often happens with new operas and theatrical works? (Spoilers: almost certainly, and I bet Igor Toronyi-Lalic would be first in line with the rotten tomatoes.)

Modern art is about risk. It's not going to be to everyone's tastes. Not all of it will stand the test of time. We can't predict how popular it will be either in its intended setting or in the future. To go back to films, who would have thought back in the 80s that Withnail & I or The Wicker Man would be considered cult classics today? No-one, which is why no money was thrown at them. Wagner's Tannhäuser and Beethoven's Fidelio both flopped at early showings, and these are now considered repertory works. Great art is often divisive. I honestly can't believe I am saying this, here, now, because to me this is all so blindingly obvious as to be cliché.

On Tragedy

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I studied classics before pursuing music. One of the things that has drawn me to opera since my degree is its similarity to Greek Tragedy. Of course, there are comic operas (and Greek comedies, for that matter, which I love just as much and find almost as interesting), but I want to talk about tragedy and the tragic here. I promise that’s not as depressing as it sounds.

Greek tragedy, for me, is one of the most fascinating art forms ever. It’s over 2000 years old, still going strong, and - believe it or not - still relevant. It’s the basis of so many of our stories, even now. Perhaps it’s because it’s hard to improve on a story almost as old as time (as we know it); perhaps it’s because Greek tragedy plays on themes that are utterly universal to our Western world - the relationship between religion and state, the perils of excess and self-denial, the complexities of justice. Most of us worship different gods, these days, but surprisingly little else has changed. For my money, Greek tragedy is the art that comes closest to having humanity at its core.

Opera has a very similar structure to Greek tragedy, and seems to have evolved in quite a similar way. Like the earliest tragedies, the earliest operas deal with mythical (or fictional, or ancient historical) stories, rarely have more than two characters on stage at once, and have long passages of introspection followed by choral commentary. As the benchmark was raised - both dramatically and musically - it became common practice to include several characters on stage at once, engaging in complex and often overlaid dialogue.

Unlike tragedy, however, opera moved away from myth and ancient history to engage with more contemporary writing. In a way, that’s very positive. There are only so many times you can retell a story that’s already at least a thousand years old, after all, and all art must move with the times or be left behind. But, somewhere between its obsession with killing off the main female character and its labyrinthine plots, opera seems to have lost sight of how tragedy really works.

Dead heroines: Dido

Like many of its contemporary works, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas has quite an uncertain history. Popular theory suggests that it was written to be performed at a girls’ school by the school’s students. Scholars like to debate who played Aeneas and where all the tenors and basses came from, though the latter is probably redundant speculation considering that female tenors and basses exist. With our extensive cast of two, Better Strangers’ Aeneas will be played by a woman and sung in soprano tessitura. No surprises there, unless you’re new to this whole project. In which case, hi!

The most famous rendition of the story of Dido and Aeneas comes from Virgil’s Aeneid. As with much Classical mythology, our protagonists appear as pawns on the giant chessboard of the gods. Aeneas, son of Venus and last survivor of the ruling dynasty of Troy, has escaped to sea. After a whopping great storm, he washes up on the shores of Carthage in North Africa, where he is taken in by Dido, the queen of the state. Dido’s having kind of a rough time at the moment. She’s sworn eternal fidelity to the ghost of her late husband; she’s got a country to rule, subjects to feed, and neighbouring tribes to fend away from the city walls and her marital bed.

The gods - particularly Juno, everyone’s favourite antagonist - decide it would be lulzy to make Dido fall in love with Aeneas, incurring the wrath of the Furies and the neighbouring tribes in a single stroke of Aeneas’ heroic wang. When Aeneas leaves for Italy, prompted by Mercury (who stops his ears so he spends, like, a week completely blanking her, which is really uncool), Dido is bereft. She has broken her oath, she has no further excuse not to marry a local chieftain and surrender her kingdom, and her authority is in ruins. She chooses to take what’s left of her dignity and throw herself onto a huge pyre, which is the last thing Aeneas sees when he looks back towards Carthage.

Thank you

We're completely overwhelmed by the response to our funding campaign on Crowdfunder. We've raised a total of £1,255, which will pay for venue hire, costuming, props and publicity, and will go some way towards paying our dudes as well. Any excess will go towards our forthcoming projects, which are based around taking the show on tour in venues and schools across the country.

A couple of you have asked why we chose to use Crowdfunder as opposed to just canvassing via Paypal. Crowdfunder asks project managers to set a target, and funders donate an amount of their choosing towards it. If the set target isn't met, the project doesn't get any money. On some level, this seems harsh - after all, every little helps, right? - but on another level it makes a lot of sense: if the project doesn't meet its target and can't go ahead, there's a mechanism in place to ensure that the managers can't just take the money and run. Being a new company, we felt it was important that our funders could feel secure in pledging their money to us.

Crowdfunder vet the projects thoroughly before putting a bid online. After that, they are more supportive than I could ever have expected - they gave us an extra week when we looked like we might be falling behind, and they allowed us at the end to lower the target so that we could compromise on an amount that would allow us to move forward, even if it's not quite as much as we were hoping for. All this was done at their prompting and not ours. Rose at Crowdfunder support, you're a star. We love you. Mwah.

We would definitely recommend the use of Crowdfunder to anyone else who was thinking of trying to raise money by crowdfunding - as fiddly as the process may look to start with, it's definitely worth it for the credibility of the process and for the stellar customer support we've received. Thanks to them. And thanks to you, everyone who's put their hands in their pockets for us. We couldn't have done this without you.

Fach Passing

Following on from Cloud's last post about singing the 'wrong' music for your 'fach' or voice type, I'm going to look at the issue from a slightly different perspective.

Throughout my singing life, I have had several of those experiences with singing teachers. A recent-ish example – I went in for a consultation with a teacher who knew me vaguely although not well. After I had sung for them for maybe 20 minutes, they looked at me funny, and said, you know, I don’t think you’re a mezzo.

No shit.

I am most comfortable singing up above the stave. I am not as much queen of the high cs as I used to be when I was slightly younger and, on the matter of vocal acrobatics at least, more fearless, but I am absolutely and definitely a soprano.

But, see, there is an expectation not just about what sort of voice type will sing what kind of music, but what kind of voice type will characterise different personality types.

I am also, to put it bluntly, pretty damn butch. Again, less than I was when I was younger and, on the matter of femininity at least, more fearful. I am clumpy, stompy; one of life’s hairy-legged angry feminists. When I find graceful, it is an embodied, earthy kind of experience, not the disembodied floatiness that the inexperienced expect ought to go hand in hand with a high, angelic voice.

Strangely enough, it turns out you cannot judge on appearances.

And yet, the stereotypes are there. Flightiness and floatiness. Or, poise and pose. Mezzos are the ones who are angry, who are earth mothers and drag-kings, who play men and pass, visually if not vocally.

We are coming pretty close to saying - the sound of your voice limits the emotions you can express. Only loud women can be angry. Only gentle women can be in love. Of course, this is an art form where tone is used as a metaphor for content, where emotions are signed and signalled through means other than words. Of course, there is an assumption that anger will not be gentle, that love will not be violent.

We categorise and then give meaning to the categories. I am absolutely definitely a soprano, I said, not three paragraphs back. What does that even mean? I sing high notes, and violent emotions. And fear holds me back from both.

I sing regularly with a bloke with profound and multiple learning disabilities, whose voice glides effortlessly from basso profundo gravel to floating soprano glissandi. Who has never learned to categorise his voice into parcels he is and isn’t allowed to make music with. We duet, across space and understanding. And I do not want to call it inspirational, or freeing, or natural – I am so, so aware of his being relegated to the status of a lesson in a life that counts. But here’s something that’s true. When I sing with him, I am not a soprano. And I can manage graceful, in his company, in that space, where he is freed from constraints of category, and so am I.

My voice has limits. Boundaries. There are things I cannot say, or even sing. Limits of biology, of possibility, and courage. But limits of convention – if high, not low; if butch, not feminine; the imposed binary opposites of gender that radiate outwards into just about every aspect of our life. Those limits are things that can be opposed, deconstructed, thought through or worked around.

What does it mean to pair a butch voice with a femme body, or vice versa? A butch range with a femme tone? I don’t know, and more than that – I can’t find out, without... performance, audience, reaction, conversation. People find it disturbing. I know that from too many stories of the difficulty trans friends get into when they open their mouths and the tone that comes out is unexpected.

I know what it feels to sing as my butch-femme self. It feels right.

And I tell you something else, which you will have heard said before if you are a reader of feminism on the internet. I am tired of watching my tone.

Fach the Tyranny, or The Importance of Being Dramatic

Hey, you! Yes, you! Do you like music? Do you like feminism? Do you like fun? Do you have a spare fiver? If you do, please donate to Better Strangers on our Crowdfunder page!

A lot of people ask me how I came to be an opera singer. The answer is long and complicated, but can be condensed down to this: I’ve been doing it since I was little; I’m good at it; and it Just Made Sense.

WonderKid!Clouds was pretty full of herself. I was told, back then, that I was something special - that I had an exceptional voice which would bring me great success. I still get told that I have a lovely voice. The one thing that they don’t tell you when you’re an idealistic little kid is that having a lovely voice doesn’t actually get you all that far.

It will surprise precisely no-one when I say that all voices are different. In classical singing, we refer to different voice types as fãcher (singular form fach). As well as Soprano/Mezzo/Alto/Countertenor/Tenor/Baritone/Bass, there are further classifications within each pitch group: soubrette, lyric, coloratura, dramatic. A very, very basic analysis goes as follows: Soubrettes have small, light voices and do best in early music through to Mozart; light lyrics can extend through Beethoven into some Romantic repertoire; full lyrics and coloratura can sing the really famous stuff; and dramatics sing Verdi and Wagner. Essentially, the difference between soubrette/light lyric and dramatic is the difference between a choirboy and the woman in the horned helmet.

I am a soubrette soprano, which periodically gives me a bit of an identity crisis. See, lyric or coloratura is where the money’s at. Mozart still gets performed reasonably often, but early music is a bit of a niche market. Which is a shame, because I think it’s glorious, but that’s another debate for another post. Much as I love early music, I also love some of the later romantic repertoire and would dearly love to sing that on a stage for money. No dice.

I hesitate, here, to say that my voice is “different”. All voices are different. Jessie has a very different voice to mine, but the thing we have in common is that neither of our voice types is particularly easy to market. In my case, there is one practical reason why I won’t get hired to sing Puccini anytime soon: my voice isn’t very loud. It will grow, I’m told, with practice and confidence, but as it stands my voice would never carry over an orchestra in a large venue.

(The obvious answer might seem to be to use a microphone. However, aside from the fact that it’s Not Done, most conventional microphones cannot broadcast the dizzying heights of a soprano voice. Believe me, I was in a rock band.)

So I’m not going to be Mimi any time soon. That’s a shame. Can I start practising now, so I can be prepared for when I am ready?

The response, at this point, is divided. If I ask my singing teacher, I am rewarded with a frown and a sharp intake of breath. Oh, no no no. Too big. You’ll hurt yourself. If I ask my vocal coach, however, I am rewarded with an encouraging smile and the promise that I’ll get there really soon - all it will take is plenty of practice and an increase in confidence. Mixed messages, much? There’s clearly no universal law that states that She Who Is Soubrette Will Break Her Voice With Lyric Arias, so whom do I believe?

Practical considerations aside, there is one thing that confuses me about a soubrette attempting bigger repertoire. In these days of orchestral reductions and, yes, microphones (where the venues can afford super expensive ones), I sometimes fail to see why I should be quite so firmly discouraged from trying it out. Sure, I’d be a silly choice for a big opera house production with a full symphony orchestra, but for a little fringe production with a piano or string quartet?

There seems to be this idea that singing certain repertoire with anything less than the ideal voice is bad and wrong and will sound horrible. The quality of my voice, however - the thing that reportedly makes it so pleasant to listen to - doesn’t change, whatever I choose to sing with it. What’s wrong with taking a few risks once in a while?

I’m excited about Ah! Forget My Fate because I get to do just that. I’ll be branching into repertoire I’m usually advised against singing. I’m not going to break my voice on it, because I’ve been doing this long enough to know what is and is not safe for me. I’m just going to sing it, the way I know how, and see where it takes me. If it really does sound awful and wrong, I’ll have learned something about the way these things were written. If it sounds all right, then maybe I can come back onto this blog next month and start really challenging these ideas about what opera “should” sound like. Because, really, why not?

How to start up an arts company in a recession.

Please help us fund the project! Make a donation by visiting our Crowdfunder page, and tell your friends!

Better Strangers exists by virtue of one of the main principles of entrepreneurship: if no-one else is doing what you want or need to be done, you might as well do it yourself. To the best of my awareness, Better Strangers is the only specifically feminist opera company around; it may well be the only one engaging as closely as we are (or aim to be) with feminist, LGBT, BME, class and disability issues.

As you’ll know, unless you’ve been living in a nuclear bunker under an island for the past two years, now is not exactly the most auspicious time to start up a small arts company with a social agenda. Funding for the arts in the UK has been cut - by 90%, according to placard statistics - and funding for charities and social enterprises is equally difficult to come by. And yet, here we are. I’m not going to say we’re a successful startup, having just announced that we’re postponing our first show due to funding uncertainties, but we’re here, and we’re hoping to make good on everything we’re aiming for.

I am 24 years old. This is my first attempt at managing anything, let alone helping to start up a whole company. I was under no illusions that it was going to be easy. I’m lucky to have a fantastic team behind me - Jessie, to whom inspiration seems to come as naturally as breathing; Sarah, a cool head in a heated time; Philip, who (aside from his excellent piano playing) specialises in telling us politely but firmly what is and is not a really silly idea. So, here is what I’ve learned about starting up a project like ours at a time like this.

1. Believe in the work. The only way you’re ever going to make an arts project work is if it’s something you live, eat, sleep and breathe. People - funders, audiences, whatever - will only care about what you’re doing if you do.

2. Build a solid team. As I’ve mentioned above, we’ve got some amazing people on board with Better Strangers. Make sure that your team is reliable, skilled, and having fun. Listen to your team - if they are telling you something, it is probably worth hearing.

3. Network. You know people. The people you know know more people. The odds are that you can find someone, somewhere in your extended network who can do that thing that you can’t find a provider for. Get to events; talk to people. Promote yourself. Be excited about your projects in the presence of new people. Talk about it on the Internet - it feels like shouting into the void, but someone is listening, I promise.

4. Be organised. Plan ahead. Build a schedule, keep to it, and make sure someone is responsible for keeping everyone on track. Factor in extra time for things going wrong.

4b. Be honest. If you’ve screwed up somewhere, talk it through. The sooner it comes out, the sooner it can be fixed and the easier it will be to build strategies to avoid screwing up the same way again. Do NOT play the blame game - it accomplishes nothing except pissing everybody off. A happy team is a healthy team.

5. Be realistic. I have been trying to do an awful lot of the admin and background work myself. Outside of Better Strangers, I am studying part time and working part time. The combination of these many factors has made me very ill. I have learned a hard lesson about what I can and cannot realistically do by myself. Make sure you’re aware of limits - your own, your team’s, your budget, and the scope of the project.

Are you also part of a feminist opera project? Let us know - it's always nice to have company!

Telling Stories Like Mine

So, after my last blog post here, “Teaching Teenagers to Sing the Heteropatriarchy”, a friend of mine said that she’d never felt the need to hear stories that centered her experience of non-heteronormative sexuality.

“Like you I have noted how much heterosexual boy-meets-girl stories don't generally apply to me. I've never really considered this an issue though, I've never felt a burning desire to see someone of my sexuality take centre stage or to tell my story. [...] I'm clearly missing something fundamental here. [...] Can you help?”

So, that got me thinking. Why do I care so much about broad representation in Opera and other stories? And why don’t some people? Why are some people interested in seeing themselves centre stage, and why are some people not interested in seeing people not like themselves centre stage?

Firstly, I think there’s something to be said for our expectations from the stories we hear being a gendered thing. See, little girls get very used to reading stories where boys are the hero; and learn to enjoy reading stories about people not like them. On the other hand, little boys get very used to reading stories about boys like them, and learn to turn their noses up and stories about anyone who might be different to them. This is certainly a well noted phenomenon across the publishing industry. Just last week I was linked to Max Barry noting the phenomenon.

Similarly, black children learn to identify with white heroes, while white children learn to expect heroes with skin colour the same as theirs. Again, last week I was linked to this on the subject.

This reinforces a cultural phenomenon, a set of power dynamics, which shows people whose experiences are close to the mainstream of a culture that their experience is normal and worth talking about. Conversely, people who’s experiences don’t reflect the mainstream of their culture, and even more so people who’s experiences contradict those of the mainstream in their culture, quickly learn that their experiences are not recognised, not seen as worthwhile - but that they should recognise and appreciate the experiences of the mainstream.

Don’t get me wrong. This is population trend stuff, not personal feelings. I seriously doubt anyone sits down and think to themselves 'I don't want to hear stories about people like me because I think straight nondisabled neurotypical white men are more interesting and important'.

But to me, this goes some way towards explaining why some people don’t find issues of representation important; perhaps even particularly people who are under-represented in a particular medium or genre. People who are under-represented don’t expect to see themselves; don’t see the need to see themselves, because they learn to identify with and value the heterosexual nondisabled white man who is standing centre stage.

It also goes some way to explaining why representation is so important. Where people are under-represented, they become invisible, even to themselves.

I think it's really important for people to hear stories about people like me - and people who are nothing like me - because I know that stories influence thinking. If people don't hear stories, they don't learn to recognise possibilities. Or perhaps those possibilities simply don’t have the same strength of emotional resonance.

For example, lots of parents are unhappy when their children come out as gay not because they're homophobic themselves but because they don't want a future for their child where that child faces homophobia and can't have a family. They are unhappy because they only have one idea about what gay people can be like - and that unhappiness turns the coming out experience into something negative for both parent and child.

Similarly, for someone like you who does not experience strong desires for romantic or sexual relationships at all, there are strong social and cultural expectations about your behaviour - that you will eventually learn some sort of life lesson or meet the right man, and then you will find that romantic relationship central to your life. People believe that in part because that's what all the stories say, from fairytales to operas to soap-operas to sci-fi and beyond. There's an expectation of heterosexual romance, a narrative framework for life, which becomes ingrained, and influence what people believe is possible and normal.

There's a self esteem issue as well. Research suggests that queer people have low self esteem partly connected to the fact that they rarely see positive images of people like them in the media. This article on LGBT suicide mentions that “society influences suicidal behavior by gay and lesbian youth [...] [by] the portrayal of homosexuals as being self-destructive.” Conversely, this article suggests that inclusive media may well be an important factor in lowering youth suicide rates amongst the gay community. Part of my day job currently is helping young LGBT people with precisely that: positive self image. My employers and their funders all recognise that a lack of positive images, positive role-models and narratives, can lead to low self esteem, negative behaviours, lack of aspirations.

In my ideal world, people would get to see stories that both reflected and challenged their experiences.

I love hearing stories about people who are different to me (I’m very used to it, after all!) But when I'm telling stories, creating stories, they will fundamentally come out of my experiences, which do not fit into the narrow confines of the kinds of stories its normal to tell anywhere in mainstream story-telling, but especially in opera.

Hence, this project. I want to create the spaces, the places and the performances which will allow people to tell all sorts of different stories, through the medium I love - the beautiful music of opera. To paraphrase Shakespeare: I do desire that we become Better Strangers....

Don't forget that our art competition is still running! Got a creative streak? Come and see what you can do with out words...

"Don't you guys have anything better to do?"

This is the question any activist of any stripe will hear at least once in their life. Or, more likely, once an hour.

I mean, their interlocutor will go on to say, there are bigger problems/natural disasters/starving children in $DEVELOPING_COUNTRY/greater social injustices in this country than problematic presentations of women and minorities in the arts. Why focus on that when there’s so much else you could be doing?

You’ve got me with the starving kids in the developing country, imaginary interlocutor. Starving kids can’t eat opera. We can’t sing floods away, either. We’d like to, but we can’t. But I’d like to talk to you a bit about the greater social injustices, because that is something we can change. Yes, even through opera.

There is an age-old saying about history being written by the winners. Who writes the history after the battle is won - when the soldiers have put down their weapons and picked up their tools and started building everything back up again? Traditionally, a ruler would have a group of people in charge of arts and culture, and those people would go and find people they could trust to make the ruler (and themselves) look good, and get them to write things. They picked painters who would tactfully leave out their less attractive features. You get the idea.

And the people who don’t make them look good? The poor people who reflect badly on their ability to provide for their subjects? The ones who are a funny colour and look a bit suspicious? The ones who can’t even walk by themselves? They get left out too; or they get left in with horrible hairy warts and bad teeth, or a fetish for goats. Which is a shame.

Visibility is a big thing for us and a major reason why we exist. Jessie’s going to tell you more about that in the next blog post.

I had a debate with my partner recently about the inclusion of BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) people in a popular TV series. More specifically, my point was that there were none to be seen. The Barbarian race was portrayed as kinda Mediterranean, I guess, but that was the closest you got. No BME main characters, maybe two or three BME extras. That’s it.

But, argued my partner, it’s set in an alternate-universe-medieval-England type of place! There were no black people in medieval England!

It’s easy to think that, for sure. I mean, the only real evidence we get for BME people being around at that time are people like Othello or Shylock in literature, and Monostatos in opera a hundred or so years later. And Othello was a jealous type who couldn’t master his innate black dude violent streak (who says racial stereotypes evolve?), and Monostatos was a creepy servile type who’d do anything if it meant he could stick it in Pamina, so couldn’t master his innate black dude rapeyness. And Shylock was a dodgy loan shark who would accept a pound of flesh in lieu of cash if people couldn’t pay up, so couldn’t master his innate Jewish love of money and the pain of innocent Christians. Not a great start. But there were others, this much I can tell you with a degree of certainty.

Before I studied music, I studied literature. Before I studied literature, I studied Classics. In Classical times, there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between the dominant culture du jour and places like Egypt. Egypt was a pretty big deal, actually. It had the world’s biggest library, loads of cash crops, spices, textiles and so on. It was the kind of country you definitely wanted on side. So those places ended up with a colony and an established trade route. So slaves were taken over to mainland Europe, and traders and skilled workers and people hoping for a better life and Roman citizenship would move over there. Some of them would earn some money and go back home. Some of them would have settled; slaves would have been freed and stayed put with the families they already had. By Julius Caesar’s time, there was an Egyptian quarter in Rome. Go figure if some of these guys didn’t eventually make their way over to Britain.

Of course, there’s little reference to them in art and literature that isn’t unflattering and racist. Artists and writers of the time often did their best to pretend that there were no strange and hideous BME or Jewish or disabled people in their perfect, white universe. Art and literary historians might well assume, on that basis, that there weren’t any there. Not so.

By extension, there were almost certainly strong, capable women, LGBTQUIA people, disabled people, people on low incomes and all sorts. They just weren’t talked about. It was more current, and more convenient, for the artists and writers and composers of the time to present them as victims or villains. That fits with their paradigm - all that is good is white, upper (or, later, middle) class, and almost invariably male. Anyone else was evil or needed help; they existed to make the rich white dudes look better.

So, by acknowledging that most opera written up until this point presents a skewed and biased worldview, we are...well, that’s it. We can’t go back and rewrite it, because we are not in the business of censorship. We just think it’s really important that the flaws are discussed openly, so that everyone is aware that things have moved on and must continue to do so. We’re not asking anyone to edit the bad parts out, and above all - and this is important - we are not asking anyone not to like it. The music is still beautiful, and the performers aren’t bad people or bad performers for taking part, provided they can question the message. We talk about its flaws, and we emerge a little wiser for how to think of the people involved, how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, and how even ugly sentiments can be made to sound or look beautiful.

As performers and directors, we can also be a little creative with our casting choices. You could put on a Magic Flute where everyone but Monostatos is played by black singers. You could re-cast a fey heroic tenor as an alto. You could employ female tenors and basses (they exist!) and experiment with the results. All kinds of interesting scenarios play out with trans, genderqueer or non-binary-gendered singers. You could experiment with different vocal and body types and see how these impact on a role. You could bother to cast disabled people, you know, at all. There’s all kinds of interesting stuff that can be done here - endless possibilities which Jessie and I are looking forward to playing with as our casting pool grows.

We’re also looking forward to commissioning new opera and music theatre that tells more people’s stories. Everyone has a story. We love stories, and we love music, and there are so many fascinating, heartbreaking, ecstatic and downright strange stories we could tell, and so much music we could tell it with. We’re very excited. Are you?


Hey. Remember our art contest? I bet you're great at art. You should totally enter!

A Legend Begins, As Does an Art Competition

Two queer feminist geeks walk into a cafe. It sounds almost like the start of a joke, doesn't it? Well, sit down, young 'uns, and I'll tell ye a tale.

Jessie and I first met in a pub surrounded by LARPers. We didn't talk much, at first, but we started to realise after a while that we had a few things in common. We both liked LARP, for a start. We also both liked opera, and sang it. We also both thought it was a damn shame that there were so many singing ladies, like ourselves, at the start of what could be a promising career if only there were enough roles to go around. And we were both feminists and activists, and our activism coloured our ideas of what we thought opera could be.

Eventually we decided that we might as well have a proper chat, away from the pub full of LARPers, about opera. And so, a few weeks later, two queer feminists walked into a cafe, and the rest is history.

Some time after that, the same two queer feminists walked into the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall, ordered a cup of tea each and an orange meringue, and started talking about Better Strangers in earnest - all the things we loved, and all the things we wanted to play with. And the result was as follows:

Now that our little baby project is all growed up (*sniff*), we're thinking we'd quite like to make this little scrap of paper into some art. Only neither of us is much good at drawing or graphics or anything snazzy like that, so this is where you come in!

Are you good at making things look nice? If so, consider this a prompt. If you can make this little baby scrap of scribbles into a big, sexy work of art, we will put your name on it and it will be used on pretty much all our publicity, ever. So your amazing art will be immortalised on the Internet, flyers, posters, funding applications and all sorts, and we will tell all our friends and funders how brilliant you are. :)

There's no deadline as such, but the sooner the better. Some time in the next 10 days to 2 weeks would be super ideal.

Have at it, you wonderful people! Submissions should go to betterstrangersopera[@]gmail[.]com.

Teaching teenagers to sing the heteropatriarchy

I met my girlfriend as a teenager on an opera summer school. I told her I was a lesbian, and we sat on a bench, in the moonlight, after the show, and held hands. That was the moment I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with her.

That’s not quite true. Who knows anything about the future when they’re that age? And besides, we’d met before. And we did not actually get together until a year or so after we’d grown out of youth-opera. But still. We sat together, in the moonlight, with the echoes of the singing fading from our ears. That much is true.

By the time we were going to opera summer schools together, I was more-or-less out in my identification of something I had not yet learned to term queer. Lesbian was far too simple a term; for a start, it did not encompass the enormous crush I had on the man conducting the opera, his expressive eyebrows and sure, gentle hands.

(To this day, I have a bit of a thing for conductors. Queer for people who make music happen, you might say. And I have said, musicality being a far more fundamental part of what makes me tick in a relationship than genitalia. And I’m not the only one who’s said it, either; I can quote academics, like Suzanne G. Cusick in Queering the Pitch, who’ve said it too. Music is sexy, and everyone knows it. I certainly know it.)

In fact, the very first time I met my girlfriend was on an opera summer school, or at least a music and drama summer school. We were about ten. It was a production based on Longfellow’s Hiawatha. The only time in about ten years of youth music and drama that the performance featured anything other than a white hero.

We said ‘how’ a lot, and we conflated the unique cultural traditions of multiple groups of Native Americans into one homogeneous mess, which we assumed to be historical rather than contemporary. To the credit of the people running it, the production ended with the symbolically danced genocide of Hiawatha and all his people, signalled by the arrival of white soldiers (who, incidentally, were all played by girls). In fact, it was only when I was checking Wikipedia while writing this blog post that I realised that that’s not how the poem ends, that in Longfellow’s version Hiawatha tells his people to embrace Christianity...

I remember two things about my character in Hiawatha. Firstly, my solo, which I can still sing to this day. And secondly, the fact that I was one of only three people made to wear dresses. The casting was almost gender-blind; by which I mean most of the girls played men, because there were very few boys. Some of the girls played genderless personifications of abstract constructs. There were three actually female characters, Hiawatha’s love interest, her grandmother, and me. I was playing the village singer. Even for the people behind this mixed-gender musical theatre performance, thematically, singing was for girls, in dresses, to perform.

My girlfriend, who I met that week for the very first time, was cast as the personification of famine. My girlfriend has always been what I will call, not resorting to the invisibility of euphemism, fat. She cried, certain that she was being mocked.

She is unhappy. I am uncomfortable in the dress I would never have chosen to wear. Here we are, ten years old, and already learning body fascism, gender policing, cultural homogenisation. Already feeling the sting of it. All through the medium of youth opera.

I am politicised now. I question the things I learned, accidentally, then, along with the notes and the steps. But how many of us will unlearn those unconscious lessons?

Later, the part that always got to me was the fact that everything we performed, everything, ended with a heterosexual wedding. Except, that is, for Dido and Aeneas, which ended instead with death.

Is it worth noting that it was Dido and Aeneas was what we had been performing, my girlfriend and I, before the night when we sat and held hands under the stars? Heterosexual love is rejected. Death, says Dido, explicitly, is the only other option.

But not for us. Not for us.

We’d been cast as witches, of course. Along with the other fat girls, frizzy-haired girls, queer girls. And we had fun with it, too. Laughing at our triumph; mad and bad and powerful, and, for once, undestroyed by the narrative, unpunished for our freedom, revelling in the destruction of others.

I remember, so damn vividly, that the girl who played Dido was blond. I tried, back then, not to care. I tried to pretend it did not matter to me.

You can’t help but take the hidden messages away. In all my years of youth opera, I was never once cast as the heroine. I played a poisoner, one year, in Beggar’s Opera; and an alto one at that, despite my soprano voice. I played witches and unnamed women; I was characterless or I was evil. If I was very lucky, I was simply cast to play men.

Very few of the young people I sang with wanted to be opera stars. Only a handful remained musicians after childhood. I know of people I used to sing with who these days are policemen, social workers, politicians. Who take the lessons they learned from opera into the wider world. Lessons gained from performance: teamwork, confidence, success, ownership and responsibility. And the other lessons, too, whether they want them or not.

Later, I started teaching on these youth opera courses. I never got to choose which operas were going to be performed; it was a while before I realised that even had I had free rein to choose, I would not have been able to do any better. The heteropatriarchy would still have triumphed with a double wedding and a perfect cadence. One ending, one possible narrative. No matter how queer and colourful the cast, no matter how politically aware the director, no matter how much we wanted our music to be transformative, the tyranny of the happy ending locked us in.

We tried as hard as we could, myself and the young female director I worked with. I remember a production of Gondoliers, where we framed the happy ending pose around the two central men, played by girls, the larger holding the smaller in the air, staring into each other’s eyes. A queer image; a female-centred image, visually. Narratively, the erasure of the women who should have mattered, the women they were going to marry whatever our staging said. No way to win; the narrative impossibilities are scored and underlined, in the music.

And so we need new music. New stories. New possibilities of performing our new selves. Because what are the other options? We end up teaching a new generation to sing from the same heteropatriarchal hymn-sheet. Or we do not sing at all.