It’s beginning to feel like ‘a production for the #MeToo era’ has become the go to marketing angle for any theatre performance that so much as acknowledges that women exist. Opera companies too, always keen to prove the art form’s relevance to modern life, have been joining in.
Of course, interpreting classics so they don’t reproduce misogynist ideas is definitely a good thing – but #MeToo refers to something else. The movement sprang from an endemically unsafe working culture, particularly for women in the entertainment industries, and it hasn’t gone away.
Opera has already seen a number of big name conductors alleged to be serial abusers of both young women and men. Like Hollywood, it’s a very hierarchical industry, with a mythos surrounding powerful men, and where employment opportunities are both very competitive and precarious.
Linda Hirst, a singer in her 70s, is worried that not enough has changed since she began her career. “The first professional engagement you get as a young singer you’re awestruck, and you want to communicate in any way you can that you understand,” she said. “There was one particular conductor that I thought was worthy of worship and I ended up with his c**k in my hand, not knowing quite what I had done, because I was very young.” She’s clear that she wasn’t forced, but that a huge imbalance of power was at play.
Along with me and Simone Ibbett-Brown, Linda is one of the co-founders of Hera, a new feminist opera company. After lots of conversations with singers about their experiences, we decided to provide some training on workplace harassment and held our first ‘Consent and Communication’ event in February. We worked with Houselights, an organisation who deliver similar training in theatre. They were struck during the workshop by just how steep the hierarchy in opera is: “A lot of the issues people were bringing up were chorus members having little or no power, and no means of communicating.”
While high-profile allegations of abuse might give the impression that we need to focus on rooting out monsters, the idea behind the training is a wider change in workplace culture. As Kimberley Turford of Houselights said: “Serious sexual assault doesn’t exist in a vacuum…you don’t get serious sexual assault without micro-aggressions and generalised oppression.” Sexist jokes, innuendo, belittling comments and unwanted touch all add up (as the hashtag #everydaysexism continues to show). For performers, a particular issue that comes up a lot is the rehearsal of onstage intimacy.
A lack of respect for performers’ autonomy when working on intimate moments, from nudity to hugs and kisses to sexual violence, is depressingly normal. Some ‘old school’ directors treat performers as little more than puppets. Many will demonstrate how to grab or touch a performer without their consent. We heard how some performers are sent away to ‘find’ or ‘work out’ an intimate moment on their own away from the main rehearsal, or even encouraged to go on a ‘date’ to help things along. It is so accepted that a ‘good attitude’ means not having boundaries that some student singers we spoke to had been made to kiss in acting class, because they ‘need to be willing to do anything’. All this behaviour forms part of the environment in which harassment can flourish.
We invited Yarit Dor, a specialist intimacy director, to work with us. As she says, performers “have a right to their body. Let’s make no assumptions that we can tell people to ‘put a hand there and then there’ without asking.” It was in Yarit’s workshop that I realised that as a director, I also need to change. I may be a woman and a feminist, but I’ve learned to direct within a theatre culture that has taught me certain ideas about spontaneity; about the rehearsal room as somewhere magic where different rules apply; about prioritising the show over everything else including personal wellbeing.
I may not treat people as puppets, but I’ve definitely set up improvisations in the past without clear enough parameters, relying instead on the accumulated trust in the room. I’ve also been annoyed when a performer has changed their mind about something they had previously agreed to, during a rehearsal process where there is never enough time. But as a woman I know that consent for something today, isn’t consent for the same thing tomorrow. I also know that trust is only there until it isn’t. It was good to be reminded that the same rules do apply.
With Hera, we want to find less hierarchical ways of working, with less ‘power over’ and more ‘power with’. Linda doesn’t want a mythos, because it stifles creativity, and is happy to start afresh with two younger women: “I’d just laugh at myself if I tried to learn on any previous reputation, that finished yesterday. It’s new, every time we communicate.”