Hackney Empire cancels opera

[MAB]

The end of Turandot, Butterfly, Lakme et al?

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-41608800 

[Scheherezade]

You couldn't make it up...

[penelopesimpson]

Is it April 1?

[MAB]

Sadly not.  I very much doubt a small company has the resources to import Chinese opera singers.  Slightly off topic I have a Chinese pal who goes ballistic if she is referred to as Asian whereas she's not at all offended by being called oriental, a word that is now politically incorrect. 

 

I'm given to understand Chinese people don't bang the race drum too much as long as they're treated with respect and I can't help wondering if someone is  taking offence on their behalf rather than complaints coming from someone who is actually Chinese.

[Sim]

In this crazy day and age it almost always someone else taking offence on an ethnic minority's behalf, which I find patronising and paternalistic.  I have a Muslim friend who was really upset when certain councils and other places decided to stop sending Christmas cards or even referring to Christmas because they didn't want to cause offence. No-one bothered to ask her or other Muslims if they were indeed offended.   She said "I love getting Christmas cards, it makes me feel included in this country's culture.  After all, it is a Christian country so why shouldn't you send Christmas cards?"  This was a few years ago when all this ridiculousness started;  you could never refer to this country as Christian anymore!!  

 

I wonder what the Hackney Empire would have thought if The National Theatre had recently pulled the plug on Amadeus because Salieri was being played by a black South African actor?  I am Italian;  did this offend me?  NO it did not.  As long as he is good in the part, who cares?  And are there any protests because a black actress is playing one of Lear's daughters at the National?  I don't think so.  And does this also mean that no-one in China, Japan or anywhere else in Asia should perform Shakespeare just because the characters aren't Asian?  Would European people living in China say they were offended?  I doubt it.    God, I am so glad I am on the old end of life's spectrum......I just can't bear what is happening to this world.  Artistic suffocation, loss of democracy, loss of freedom of speech and expression.....when I was young I never thought this would happen in the West, but hey ho...

[LinMM]

I would have thought that in a World where race does not matter ANYONE should be able to perform any role anywhere in the World.

But perhaps this is naive of me I don't know anymore.

 

To sympathise a bit Sim ....the other day when all the horrible things were going on in Spain and Trump was going on about "standing up to Korea" and all the Brexit Shennanigans going on here I thought exactly the same thing ....I'm glad I'm in the last decades of my life ...which I honestly never thought I would ever think ....I've always had a sense of optimism ...but now I'm just not so sure any more.

 

 

 

[MAB]

I was told a story recently about a dancer who innocently posted footage of a colleague dancing to music by Nina Simone which outraged a black dancer who claimed white dancers have no right to dance to black music.  The dancer (known to all here), took the image down to avoid further unpleasantness, but what I find disturbing is that racism, an evil with a clear definition, seems to have become anything someone from a minority says it is.

 

 

[Sim]

And it always seems to work in one direction only.   The dancer who posted the footage should have said to the complainant:  "Fine.  In that case, no black dancer in the RB or ENB should ever be allowed to dance to Tchaikovsky or any other white composer."   Can you imagine the outrage?   People are just getting more and more ridiculous.  I would have told that moron where to go, and left the footage up there.  Art is art, and as I said above, colour, race, religion.....who cares, as long as people give their best?  

 

Re. the opera, I am assuming now that no-one except Japanese singers will ever be able to do The Mikado again, and only Japanese singers will be able to sing Cio-Cio San?  What a silly, silly place our world has become.  

[MAB]

That has already happened in drama, where Shakespeare's Othello cannot be played by a white actor thereby robbing us of the country's major white actors ever playing the role.  As if Shakespeare had a supply of black actors at the Globe!  In fact Moor is a very loose term, In the TV history series about Spain, Blood and Gold, Simon Sebag Montefiore was describing red headed Moorish despots ruling the country during the occupation.  Throws a whole new light on how The Moor of Venice may have looked. 

[Sim]

And I hope that they will never show the film Coming to America again where Eddie Murphy 'whites up' as an old Jewish guy in the barber shop.  Personally I thought it was very funny, as did my Jewish NY friends, but hey ho, we are all old enough to still have a sense of humour...

[RuthE]

5 hours ago, MAB said:

That has already happened in drama, where Shakespeare's Othello cannot be played by a white actor thereby robbing us of the country's major white actors ever playing the role. 

 

In all other roles our Shakespearean theatre companies seem to be generally really good at absolute "colour blind" casting, which in my view is as it should be.

 

I can't say I "notice" performers' race on stage in terms of whether it's appropriate to the character itself; what DOES register with my suspension-of-disbelief klaxon is when members of a nuclear family are portrayed on stage by (for example) two white people as the parents with three kids who are one white, one black and one Asian.  A regular scenario in theatre, opera and ballet.  But when I say "it registers", I mean I notice it at the beginning, process it and move on.  It doesn't impact upon my reaction to the performance in any way.

 

I must say I find it a bit odd the way ENO have cast their current run of Aida.  It would appear from the casting that there has been a deliberate production decision to ensure that all the "Ethiopian" principal characters are played by singers who could plausibly be from somewhere in Africa (we're talking two original Aidas, one replacement Aida and the sole Amonasro).  But this decision hasn't extended to trying to cast the Egyptian characters to look plausibly like people from Egypt which is *also in Africa* and not enormously far north of Ethiopia - they're all white, except for Ramfis the priest, who's been double cast with one black singer and one white one.

 

Of course when Birmingham Opera Company did Otello they had the black tenor Ronald Samm in the title role, but with the also black Keel Watson as Iago at least they couldn't be accused of casting based on race!

[Scheherezade]

This is surely a no-brainer. Casting should be based upon technical and dramatic ability, irrespective of colour, but in this day and age where, to appease the extraordinary sensibilities of the snowflake generation, universities openly suppress free speech and open debate and those who hold hold views that conflict with the narrow-minded PC brigade are openly vilified, what can you expect?

[Sim]

Totally agree.  Universities "no platforming" people  whose views they don't like?   Aren't these supposed to be the bastions of intellectual debate?  Whatever happened to "I may disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it"?  Everybody who has fought to defend our freedoms and democracy in the past centuries would be spinning in their graves if they could see how much these freedoms are now being eroded.  My husband says there will be a backlash against this ridiculousness;  maybe not in our lifetime, but he is sure it will happen.  Can't come soon enough.  

[Scheherezade]

There has to be a backlash. The difficulty, I think, is that there is a lack of debate today in the home. I was brought up to question and debate everything, which included acceptance of divergent views, as were my children, who get tagged as argumentative amongst their peers, whose views are largely formed by opinions expressed on social media.

[alison]

It's happening, Sim, it's happening.  And the more people feel that their ability to express themselves freely is being suppressed, the more they are likely to turn to other, and more extreme, methods. I am becoming more and more convinced that this is at least partly responsible for some of the increase in hate crimes and the like that we're seeing.  And look how nasty all this Brexit business has got - on both sides.

[alison]

If I can digress from the "Not Dance" aspect for a while, something which has been bugging me since last night: has anyone ever seen a performance of Agon with a white dancer in the Arthur Mitchell role?

[Lizbie1]

19 minutes ago, alison said:

If I can digress from the "Not Dance" aspect for a while, something which has been bugging me since last night: has anyone ever seen a performance of Agon with a white dancer in the Arthur Mitchell role?

 

I don't remember who it was but for some reason I feel confident that it was a white dancer in the Bolshoi staging a dozen years ago

 

Edited to add: the woman was definitely Shipulina, as I remember it being the first time I really took note of her.

Edited October 20, 2017 by Lizbie1