A culture, if you can keep it
Ontario the dystopian is already here
A funny thing happened during last night’s performance of Le Nozze di Figaro at the Paris Opera, reports ForumOpera. There was a curtain announcement informing the audience that Peter Mattei would not be singing the Count due to unspecified illness and that he would be replaced by a singer of similar bari-stature, Christopher Maltman. Fine, was the audience response, let’s have it. The papers have previously speculated that Lea Desandre had caught the bug and would not be performing, but she was there as usual. Then early in the opera, Marcellina (Dorothea Röschmann) and Bartolo (James Creswell), important minor characters, came out and sang with FFP2 masks, which, the commentator grumbles, had detrimental effects on the quality of vocal performance. In the second act, the Countess (Maria Bengtsson), although completely alone in the “Porgi amor” scene, also came out with a mask on and was, says the correspondent, barely audible. Her spouse the Count, Christopher Maltman, returned on stage wearing a surgical mask. “It’s then that we realized,” writes the FO critic, “that we were witnessing a covid outbreak in real time.” Although we understand, he continues, after two years of stop-go and cancellations, the willingness to perform at all costs, we wonder if it’s worth going on on the night when it clearly affects the quality of performance.
Reading this from Ontario was like reading a report from another planet. Barring a couple of exceptions which eventually also ended up being forced to close (the Crow’s Theatre was one… the short-lived Mirvish season another), theatre life in Ontario shut down in March 2020, and with it the whole of opera. It remains shut down to this day. Some of the better connected medium-size companies found ways to obtain funding to film stuff, therefore shooting themselves in the foot. The usually innovative we’ll-have-opera-no-matter-what Against the Grain company produced a bizarrely woke and made-by-the-committee The Messiah for video, inviting singers to express their many and diverse identiterian grievances through Handel arias. If you measure success by the amount of media coverage obtained, The Race-iah was very successful. The NYT wrote about it, and so we got to hear from a former COC Ensemble singer who looks like a Hollywood star and who is represented by the powerhouse that is Harrison Parrott about her feelings of being somehow subliminally oppressed while walking through her home town of Montreal, because her mom is a Moroccan immigrant. In addition to its pandemic pivot to video, the long-time Torontonian indie opera beacon ATG moved lock stock and barrel to Alberta, as its two founding members accepted jobs there.
I wasn’t going to write about the political turn of the “digital art” in Ontario. That’s for another time. It’s probably connected to this bigger problem I want to talk about, but let’s put it away for now.
“Tafelmusik is proud to announce its 2021/22 season” – which was entirely digital. I remember well that press release. Was it summer 2021? It was a very optimistic period, with performing arts hopping around the world. But the elsewhere optimistic summer of 2021 was dead in Ontario. I remember reading in July that the one theatre in my hometown in Montenegro, population 15,000, average wealth of citizen don’t even go there, presented nine productions in the month of July. Some would play a couple of days only, some of those were guesting from another city, but still, nine effing productions. Number of theatre productions in Toronto that same July, population 2.5 million, number of theatre companies considerable, average wealth of citizen considerable? Zero.
It was a sad summer after a devastating winter. I’ve heard rumours of unions not being too happy about having to work in the summer, and that that was among the reasons nothing was happening. In best of times, the Ontario performing arts shut down from early June until about the end of TIFF. It’s a curious phenomenon, which I tried to analyze in a WN piece a few years back. The awkward conclusion suggests itself, that the bulk of the theatre-going GTA consists of the well-off citizens who spend every leisure hour of the summer in their out-of-town cottages. Or is it that the seasons are still programmed around their schedules? Chicken or egg?
Orchestras and music venues I’ve noticed had a slightly stronger urge to come back over these sad two years. When I talked with Orchestras Canada’s ED early in the game, she had already spotted a variety of approaches and degrees of eagerness to go back. But after a year of peddling digital content the TSO showed that it was serious about returning in October 2021. The RCM’s Koerner Hall was the only eager beaver of Toronto’s performing venues and consistently so throughout the pandemic. It too was forced to close whenever the provincial government felt like it. They forced it closed again in January 2022. I was looking forward to the brand new opera about Glenn Gould, co-produced with Tapestry Opera, composed by Brian Current. Hanging grand pianos were promised. There was, the audacity!, some palpable ambition around the project. A world premiere! In the pandemic! I’ve circled it so many times in my calendar, I tore the calendar.
The world premiere of the Glenn Gould opera was unceremoniously cancelled with the January 2022 shutdown, which closed museums and galleries too, those riotous centres of covid super-spreading. Somebody’s lack of analysis/interest/information, followed by a signature, and hundreds of people are out of a job and life in this city back to empty.
Early in December 2021 I had the winter solstice at the Kensington Market event in the calendar. It’s an outdoors event with giant puppets, fire eaters, drums, the works. Then of course the wave of insanity around omicron hit the globe. (This is going to be the worst thing we have ever seen in our lives, wrote the Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur, with not a small amount of glee.) But only some jurisdictions jumped to cancel everything pre-emptively. The company whose signature event the winter solstice is rushed to cancel itself. Because, we were told, they care too much about the safety of their audience.
The two cultures which were the original ingredients of Canada, France and the UK, adopted very different approaches to what we’ve been (not) doing here. Although bizarrely each flirted with curfews in 2020, neither dropped the ball on the needs of the performing arts sector and had both culture sectors and audiences which clamoured for reopening. Major arts union in Paris occupied a theatre at one particularly dormant point, demanding return to work. Already in 2020, theatres were improvising and envisioning solutions beyond the zero-covid. Conductor Speranza Scappucci found herself conducting a Mozart opera in Theatre du Capitole de Toulouse in Southern France when some of the orchestra members tested positive. Canada (and China) would of course have shut the whole thing down that second, and run screaming. TdC and the creative team decided to go on; Scappucci reduced the orchestra to a few main players and took over the harpsichord herself. It’s opera, for crying out loud. People figuring out how to go on by hook or by crook through wars, plagues, church censorship and donor entitlement since 1600.
Meanwhile, after learning in 2020 what not to do, the UK allowed a demonic amount of work to take place on its stages for most of the pandemic. When zero-covid policy shut down massive productions like the new Andrew Lloyd Weber musical Cinderella, it too was put into question. Why can’t the rest of us negative tests work if the one positive stage hand has to quarantine, type thing. My impression is that the last few months the UK’s live arts saw a cacophony of approaches to the overall effect of having a very very lively sector fighting, successfully, for its right to exist. Everything was back, opera, theatre, indies, commercial companies, comedy, everybody was back in relatively unventilated rooms sharing space and air with other people. The UK decided not to mandate vaccines and masks and left it to the businesses themselves to decide what they want to do. And those businesses wanted people back.
And people did come back. In decent numbers, if perhaps not in numbers hoped for.
So we come to the second problem which for Canada is only on the horizon, while it’s already present in countries which kept their performing arts busy last year.
The UK theatre magazine The Stage described it in 2021 as the expected “Big Return”. The accumulated demand. The pent-up frustration. The floodgates that will burst! The floodgate did not burst, alas. Every company polled shared that the ticket sales were down, by modest to considerable percentage.
Alexander Neef said in an interview with the same ForumOpera in the fall 2021 that the main loss of revenue at the Paris Opera was in subscriptions. They are down 45%. “Nous sommes passés de 220.000 à 120.000 places vendues en abonnement.” And foreign visitors, which made up about 20% of all ticket sales, are not back.
If you’ve been told for 2+ years that it’s not safe for you to go out, you won’t go out.
In Ontario, there’s the added whammy of organizations themselves not willing to risk any god damned thing to perform. We have a scared, hunkered down population looking at digital season announcements by arts orgs and cultural institutions which are themselves unwilling to work, waiting for the zero-risk situation to get out of the pyjamas. It’s almost like that GIF with cloned Supermen running into each other. Are you… unwilling? I’m unwilling too.
The Metropolitan opera meanwhile performing through the omicron panic undeterred. They did ask for proof of boosting and mandatory masking, an opera friend in NYC tells me, but they went on.
In Toronto, to mark the omicron, public library decides to shut down 40 branches. Public library! “So we can provide consistent and equitable access to libraries, we are shutting down 44 branches”. And when you enter one of the few open branches, security personel will greet you. I’ve never seen that many security guards in public libraries. What are you doing to librarians Toronto.
Covid however has become the magic excuse for everything a given company does not want to do. “Because we prioritize safety of all our contractors, staff and readers, we will not be printing next issue of the magazine.” Please don’t prioritize my safety, I beg of you.
The federal government meanwhile introduced another benefit, this one specifically for the performing artists. At this juncture, these benefits just show the utter poverty of vision. Yes we see there’s a problem, here’s some money to put in that hole in the dam.
I remain heartbroken, astonished by the state of things, and have no idea how we can move forward. And it’s not entirely evident that Ontarians need culture in their lives. If they did, they would have said something. Film industry has found the way to go on, and clearly has lobbying capacities in Ontario that no other culture sector does. But even for it, the end of cinema-going may be in sight. (Was listening to Kara Swisher’s podcast the other day and she was saying to Alison Bechdel, no, going out to watch a movie, that’s over. And I thought, shit. That too.)
It’s bleak. And worse, few people care that it’s this bleak.
Really interesting piece. I live and work mainly in Europe, classical music. and fortunately have been able to more or less continue thanks to both luck and timing, and tenacity of presenters and other artists. I wish they all read your piece. Each country here has a different policy and outlook but the show is trying to go on, that's for sure. Vienna Staatsoper last week even replaced the entire choir at the last minute, for Peter Grimes!