Aria Umezawa on "Managing the Challenges of the Inherited Repertoire"

AO Co-Founder, Aria Umezawa was invited to speak on a panel for OPERA America called "Managing the Challenges of the Inherited Repertoire". The following is a transcript of her response to the session prompt.

PROMPT: “Opera houses have been filled for years with performances of the European repertoire inherited from the extended 19th century, from Mozart to Puccini. In the 21st century, these works are being re-examined through the lens of contemporary social norms, and many of them are found to revolve around stories that invoke harmful stereotypes, the mistreatment of women, and a culture of oppression. Should these works be dropped from the repertoire? Should they be retold in ways that align with today’s values? What are producers and artists to do?”

ARIA: “I want to share an analogy I’ve been using in conversations recently about the function of arts institutions in our society. My view is that arts institutions are like gyms for the mind. Our purpose is to encourage cognitive flexibility and intellectual and emotional resilience in our members. Simply put - opera’s value is in its ability to challenge people, and get those intellectual gears turning. That said, any fitness buff will tell you that there are healthy and harmful ways to train.  

Now I want to drill into what we mean by problematic, because it’s a terribly kind word for what we’re really talking about:

Murder. Abuse. Rape. Homophobia, transphobia, and the erasure of LGTBQ stories. Exoticism, orientalism, antisemitism, and anti-Black racism. Colonialism and genocide. These things aren’t just abstract problematic concepts. 

For the people and communities these things affect, they are traumatic. No matter how we might attempt to contextualize, re-contextualize, ignore, or excuse them. 

Deconstructing the trauma present in our art form in a detached and logical way is a luxury that is not available to everyone. We’d do well to remember that we aren’t inviting artists and audiences into our spaces to mentally divest from our work, but we are inviting them to engage their whole emotional selves in our processes. At its best, witnessing and creating art is a deeply personal experience that inspires growth. To that end I think it’s fair for people to feel angry or betrayed if they find they’ve been manipulated into vicariously reliving their trauma, or the trauma of their communities with little care and to no obvious end. 

When determining what to do with a problematic body of inherited work, we might first ask: What function does presenting trauma on our stages serve? And who is it serving? 

We want to apply a healthy amount of intellectual stress without causing injury. We should strive to do no harm with our creative output. There can be real benefit to unpacking trauma in a public forum. It can be an opportunity for learning, for validation and catharsis, for empathy building. But I would implore us to resist the urge to reduce the scope of trauma’s impact on the individual and on our culture, and I would caution us against recklessly co-opting the trauma of others for our own edification. I would decide that the exploration of trauma is valuable to the public insofar as it encourages healing and understanding. Then, with this new framing, I would look back on the inheritance we’ve claimed. 

What we might find is that some of these titles in the right hands can be re-framed, some can be valuable tools as they are, and some of them might not be the right story for this moment in our history. These are the stories that won’t heal us, but will continue to inflict harm on the people and communities we are trying to reach. Their benching from the popular repertoire should be conceived not as censorship but as harm reduction. 

Any fitness buff will tell you that you should rest the day after a particularly stressful workout. Many of our communities have been enduring sustained trauma for centuries. They need space to recover. When they tell us that what we’re doing is causing them pain, we need to believe them and be mindful of their feedback as we go about crafting our intellectual and emotional seasons. 

This process of examining, reframing, and shelving beloved works is our responsibility as curators. We are not likely to find contemporary resonance for operas by thoughtlessly retelling the same narratives of trauma, and we cannot do it by intellectualizing and distancing ourselves from its emotional impact.  

Here is my fitness challenge for the opera industry: That we own our responsibilities as cultural coaches, and choose to nurture our societies and communities in a way that is ethical and accounts for consequences of our actions. I see a world where every person can come to an opera house, no matter what is being presented, to explore and stretch past the boundaries of their imagination without fear of sustaining psychological injury.”