Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TRACTION (Opera co-creation for a social transformation)
Période du rapport: 2021-01-01 au 2022-12-31
Inequality is the defining issue of our time. It constrains the lives and chances of millions of European citizens and makes it harder to address existential threats. Europe is a cultural space, or it is nothing. Unless its citizens share, and feel common ownership of, the culture that expresses what are lightly called “European Values” there is a real threat to the most successful peace-building project we have known.
Opera is the unavoidable heart of this challenge. A cornerstone of European cultural heritage, opera has always spoken to both elites and people, expressed both authority and revolution. Its colour, passion, beauty and drama have inspired generations. But in recent decades, this art has too often lost sight of its popular roots and radical edge. European Opera may be the total art that includes every aspect of practice, the theatre of emotion that aspires to transcendent and universal artistic experience. Opera is in danger of becoming a symbol of European inequality but – crucially – it also has the capacity to rewrite that story, to include those left behind in wider prosperity, to renew itself and so find the energy, the resonance and the heart to be once again the root of living culture.
Traction provides a bridge between opera professionals and specific communities at risk of exclusion based on trials, understood as experimental attempts embracing new technology, to foster the co-creation of community operas and novel audiovisual formats. Moreover, TRACTION also addresses cross-fertilisation activities between these trial-nodes and new ones that will join the network during its lifetime.
Five specific objectives are being addressed to demonstrate the feasibility of this novel approach:
O1: Promote, through their empowerment, a transformation of communities at risk of exclusion
O2: Establish an effective collaborative and participatory production workflow for the co-creation and co-design of art representations
O3: Lay down a community-centric methodology to conduct an efficient and measurable community dialogue that will last in time and be replicable
O4: Explore novel audiovisual formats based in European cultural heritage, such as opera
O5: Maximise the social and market impact of the TRACTION results
Opera is the unavoidable heart of this challenge. A cornerstone of European cultural heritage, opera has always spoken to both elites and people, expressed both authority and revolution. Its colour, passion, beauty and drama have inspired generations. But in recent decades, this art has too often lost sight of its popular roots and radical edge. European Opera may be the total art that includes every aspect of practice, the theatre of emotion that aspires to transcendent and universal artistic experience. Opera is in danger of becoming a symbol of European inequality but – crucially – it also has the capacity to rewrite that story, to include those left behind in wider prosperity, to renew itself and so find the energy, the resonance and the heart to be once again the root of living culture.
Traction provides a bridge between opera professionals and specific communities at risk of exclusion based on trials, understood as experimental attempts embracing new technology, to foster the co-creation of community operas and novel audiovisual formats. Moreover, TRACTION also addresses cross-fertilisation activities between these trial-nodes and new ones that will join the network during its lifetime.
Five specific objectives are being addressed to demonstrate the feasibility of this novel approach:
O1: Promote, through their empowerment, a transformation of communities at risk of exclusion
O2: Establish an effective collaborative and participatory production workflow for the co-creation and co-design of art representations
O3: Lay down a community-centric methodology to conduct an efficient and measurable community dialogue that will last in time and be replicable
O4: Explore novel audiovisual formats based in European cultural heritage, such as opera
O5: Maximise the social and market impact of the TRACTION results
From the beginning of the project, we asked ourselves some questions. Does opera still matter? What could be its future? The Traction consortium thinks opera is extraordinary, and co-creation is central to its future. Traction was a partnership of opera companies, research institutes and universities established to explore how opera might tell new stories in new ways that resonate with today’s European societies. We worked with communities in Barcelona, Portugal and Ireland to co-create three exploratory operas. The foundation of our work was co-creation - a process in which professional artists work on an equal basis with non-professional artists to create new art. Everyone involved is an artist, just as everyone in a marathon is a runner. But they bring different resources to the creative process. Professional artists have skills, knowledge, experience and judgement. Non-professionals have fresh ideas, things to say and a need to say it. Together, they can co-create something that neither could have made alone.
Barcelona: A big-scale community opera production - The first community opera was led by the Liceu Opera House in Barcelona, working together with people from Raval to co-create a new opera about their own dynamic, diverse but often misjudged neighbourhood. La Gata Perduda is the story of a community’s self-defence against exploitation by those who would sell it off and enrich themselves. The opera drew on interviews with residents to shape a story of joyful resistance. Three hundred and fifty local people sang, danced and acted with professional opera artists, while hundreds more co-created the costumes, stage set and posters. So many people wanted to see the performances that a thousand were invited to the dress rehearsal - no one wanted to miss the Liceu takeover by Raval.
Portugal: Community opera in a youth prison - In Portugal, the SAMP music school has been producing Mozart with inmates of Leiria Youth Prison for several years, but Traction gave them the chance and the resources to co-create a new opera based on the lives of the participants and their relatives. The production used a Traction digital tool called Co-Creation Stage to link performers on the stage with others in the music pavilion at the prison, as well as people involved in the operas in Barcelona and Dublin. The opera reimagined the myth of Ulysses and Penelope, separated by their own decisions, to create a moving and original work that was performed twice inside the prison and twice in a Lisbon concert hall. This work involves long-term change, for the people who take part and for the prison service that has been an invaluable supporter of the opera project.
Ireland: The world’s first VR community opera - The Irish opera was original in a different way - it is the first Virtual Reality (VR) opera, co-created by professional and non-professional artists. Irish National Opera used the Co-Creation Space – a new digital tool developed by Traction – to enable people in different parts of the country to co-create the opera’s music, visual imagery and narrative. The 20-minute piece, experienced only through a VR headset, reworks Irish myths into a story of climate destruction and moral choices with alternate endings, according to the viewer’s responses. About a hundred non-professionals contributed to the process, including some who played or sang in the opera’s composition.
Barcelona: A big-scale community opera production - The first community opera was led by the Liceu Opera House in Barcelona, working together with people from Raval to co-create a new opera about their own dynamic, diverse but often misjudged neighbourhood. La Gata Perduda is the story of a community’s self-defence against exploitation by those who would sell it off and enrich themselves. The opera drew on interviews with residents to shape a story of joyful resistance. Three hundred and fifty local people sang, danced and acted with professional opera artists, while hundreds more co-created the costumes, stage set and posters. So many people wanted to see the performances that a thousand were invited to the dress rehearsal - no one wanted to miss the Liceu takeover by Raval.
Portugal: Community opera in a youth prison - In Portugal, the SAMP music school has been producing Mozart with inmates of Leiria Youth Prison for several years, but Traction gave them the chance and the resources to co-create a new opera based on the lives of the participants and their relatives. The production used a Traction digital tool called Co-Creation Stage to link performers on the stage with others in the music pavilion at the prison, as well as people involved in the operas in Barcelona and Dublin. The opera reimagined the myth of Ulysses and Penelope, separated by their own decisions, to create a moving and original work that was performed twice inside the prison and twice in a Lisbon concert hall. This work involves long-term change, for the people who take part and for the prison service that has been an invaluable supporter of the opera project.
Ireland: The world’s first VR community opera - The Irish opera was original in a different way - it is the first Virtual Reality (VR) opera, co-created by professional and non-professional artists. Irish National Opera used the Co-Creation Space – a new digital tool developed by Traction – to enable people in different parts of the country to co-create the opera’s music, visual imagery and narrative. The 20-minute piece, experienced only through a VR headset, reworks Irish myths into a story of climate destruction and moral choices with alternate endings, according to the viewer’s responses. About a hundred non-professionals contributed to the process, including some who played or sang in the opera’s composition.
Apart from the three trials (Barcelona, Portugal and Ireland), where three new operas were co-created as explained above, the project worked towards the following achievements:
1. A book with the guiding principles, mainly written by François Matarasso (partner of the project) with the support of the consortium. The intended audience is opera organisations across Europe.
2. A short Policy Paper for stakeholders interested in policy making. This paper summarises the most relevant aspects of some project deliverables.
3. Over 30 scientific publications, some of them high-impact scientific articles for those that would like to learn more about evaluation methodologies for co-creation (such as Defining and assessing artistic co-creation: the TRACTION proposal). These papers present the instruments used in Traction as well as the results and what we learned. Moreover, the Traction project created some infographics with the outcomes of the evaluation results to catch the attention of those that are not used to long and deep scientific papers.
4. A toolset with technology to support the co-creation process. There are two main tools to highlight as an outcome of the project: The Co-Creation Space, a tool to foster and promote asynchronous communication during co-creation activities between diverse communities and participants; and the Co-Creation Stage, a tool that connects communities and individuals in real-time, allowing multiple co-located stages and participants to perform together. We commissioned a video about technology to show why the tools are relevant and how they can be used listening to the perspective of the end-users.
1. A book with the guiding principles, mainly written by François Matarasso (partner of the project) with the support of the consortium. The intended audience is opera organisations across Europe.
2. A short Policy Paper for stakeholders interested in policy making. This paper summarises the most relevant aspects of some project deliverables.
3. Over 30 scientific publications, some of them high-impact scientific articles for those that would like to learn more about evaluation methodologies for co-creation (such as Defining and assessing artistic co-creation: the TRACTION proposal). These papers present the instruments used in Traction as well as the results and what we learned. Moreover, the Traction project created some infographics with the outcomes of the evaluation results to catch the attention of those that are not used to long and deep scientific papers.
4. A toolset with technology to support the co-creation process. There are two main tools to highlight as an outcome of the project: The Co-Creation Space, a tool to foster and promote asynchronous communication during co-creation activities between diverse communities and participants; and the Co-Creation Stage, a tool that connects communities and individuals in real-time, allowing multiple co-located stages and participants to perform together. We commissioned a video about technology to show why the tools are relevant and how they can be used listening to the perspective of the end-users.