Covent Garden embraces slavery narrative
OperaROH press release:
The Royal Opera House today announces Insurrection: A work in progress – a series of semi-staged sharings in the Linbury Theatre, based on a new work currently in development that explores how we come together to understand the legacy of enslavement. The events will run from Tuesday 21 – Saturday 25 March 2023 which is International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Over 200 years on from the Barbados Rebellion (16 April 1816) – an uprising organised by enslaved men and women who worked on the island’s many estates and plantations – baritone, artist and broadcaster Peter Brathwaite is developing Insurrection – investigating his own ancestors, who were enslaved workers and enslavers on sugar plantations in Barbados. Insurrection charts the story of rebellion and resistance in Barbados, and celebrates the human need to gather, move, make music, and tell stories, amid, and in response to, oppression.
Insurrection will be workshopped and rehearsed in the Linbury Theatre throughout March, culminating in a series of sharings presented in the round to schools, community groups and the public. At these sharings, audience members will be asked to reflect on the work, discuss the stories told and explore the music’s impact.
Sharings, huh? Not actual performances.
Not even Va, pensiero, Verdi’s chorus of the Hebrew slaves.
Pictured: Rebellion monument in Barbados
No more performances of Nabucco then…
How much relevance has historical accuracy?
Are those selling the slaves ever black in these enlightening performances? Or are nuances undesired, disrupting the narrative?
Why not revive “Toussaint” ?- it’s a terrific opera!
Leftism, by its very nature, destroys everything it touches, and the daily headlines are a veritable score sheet of Western greatnesses knocked down by this new religion. What an intensely arid and boring period we now find ourselves in. Are you interested in anything more than racial grievance or gender b.s.? Sorry – you’re outta luck.
What exactly is being destroyed, here? New works get commissioned and performed, as the Linbury’s mission is. What is destructive here?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUJvki4VNwE&ab_channel=SembieGishto
This rubbish is displacing something that might be of real value.
Before George Floyd, not a person in sight spoke about slavery. Then, all of a sudden! – it was a major problem in the West.
Wonder why?
1- That’s not true.
2- Because it’s really important to understand present society, culture, politics, economics, International Relations, natural sciences, etc.
Hope that helps.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, it is just that if there would be a proportional reflection on the importance of incidents, we would have had about a thousand Holocaust operas and just as many 9/11 operas. (Are there any of the latter?) Five days of enslavement operas seems to be at little bit too much. I still believe this to be a fashion thing and where the money is for the time being. I just don’t understand how this fashion could spring out from the death of George Floyd. (But this is perhaps another discussion.)
‘Because it’s really important to understand present society’
Why the moronic obsession with the transatlantic slave trade then?
Because the entire present day history of the US owes its successes to the slave labour brought from the transatlantic slave trade, now go make some friends.
Because, in the case of this artist, it is literally part of his personal history. As is the case for thousands – if not millions of other Britons and people around the world. Just a reminder, Barbados became independent in 1966. British colonialism there is not exactly ancient history.
It’s not ‘part of his personal history’; it’s something he’s learnt about.
For someone like Brathwaite, born in the 1980s, the Second World War was ancient history; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the First Gulf War probably meant little to a small boy. No native Briton has any personal experience of slavery.
Incidentally, why do you consider that Barbados belongs to the descendants of African slaves rather than the British/Irish settlers?
Good to know that for you, Britain can dispense with all the World War I commemorations too, poppies, Remembrance Day and the lot. After all, no WW1 combatants are alive anymore, so it’s all something people have “learned about”. And let’s get that Nelson column down as well, no Briton has personal experience of the Napoleonic wars.
You’re confused. I’m saying that emotion concerning the distant past is synthetic and learnt (and for a young person, even twenty year’s before their birth is a long time).
Just as no one in Britain feels genuine emotion when they think of Nelson (or Cecil Rhodes…), neither do they truly feel strongly when they consider the transatlantic slave trade. It’s madness to pull down statues (unless perhaps they’re of George Floyd or Winnie Mandela) and it’s just as crazy to become agitated over the slave trade or the British Empire.
Remembrance Day is of course not merely a commemoration of World War I.
Would you look at that, a cultural institution producing cultural events related to wider debates in society. Is that shocking?
Not at all. What I want to know, however, is what the hell is a ‘staged sharing’?
“At these sharings, audience members will be asked to reflect on the work, discuss the stories told and explore the music’s impact.”
Voilà.
I would note, also, that that is the explicit purpose of the Linbury, to be experimental in contents and format. New works, new approaches, new formats. This isn’t exceptional.
This doesn’t sound exactly new, experimental or ground breaking.
Is ‘sharings’ even a noun?
I have a hunch that ‘staged sharing’ is code for ‘You’d better like it, or else!”
‘cultural events related to wider debates’
They’re very narrow debates.
Ah, yes, the tiny, marginal debate concerning race and British imperialism. Trivial. No one talks about it, certainly not the front pages of several newspapers on a quasi-weekly basis. And certainly not half of Cabinet.
No talks about it unless they’re very easily influenced and incapable of much analysis. Any emotion expressed about the British Empire is synthetic. You’ll care about something else soon.
And which of many slave trades are they concentrating on?
Hazard a guess.
I’d venture the one that is described in the press release, which is the one to which the artist is most directly connected.
Last weekend, this blog was complaining that the ROH wasn’t British enough, in that it welcomed artists from all over the world into its Jette Parker programme. Today, it “why are they talking about Britain and British history?” Funny, that…
“why are they talking about Britain and British history?”
But only part of it. The Barbary slave trade, which is also part of British history, is rarely mentioned …… naturally.
Imbeciles.
One word: tiresome.
‘Insurrection will be workshopped and rehearsed in the Linbury Theatre throughout March, culminating in a series of sharings presented in the round to schools, community groups and the public’
Do students at these schools have the option of not attending?
Please, Royal Opera, in future try to write in language that doesn’t sound as if it was compiled by a computer algorithm programmed to insert pseudo-words (e.g., ‘workshopped’ and ‘sharings’) into text wherever possible. (By the way, why is an opera company apparently rehearsing insurrection with schools, community groups and ‘the public’?)
‘Do students at these schools have the option of not attending?’
Or saying that they feel someone’s trying to brainwash them? Or saying that it’s rubbish? It’s sickening that children are often afraid to say what they think nowadays.
Spoken to many children then, have you?
Well, I teach children and it’s amazing how thoughtful they can be when they’re not being indoctrinated with (what they recognise as) destructive left-wing nonsense. They also know that George Floyd was a natty thug, not a saint.
Fortunately my children and their friends seem to have healthy bullsh!t detectors.
Bravo.
It must be the first time the words “slavery”, “leftism”, “fashion” and “tiresome” have been linked together with such insidious rancour.