7. MEDIDAS DE CONTROL Y ERRADICACIÓN
7.5. Control biológico
4.1 Introduction
In his Master’s thesis, Composition in crisis: Case studies in South African Art Music 1980-2006, Thomas Pooley discusses the crises local composition has been facing since the early 1980s due to a shift in paradigm caused by political changes in the country. He argues that ‘the demise of Apartheid and the rise of democracy resulted in an institutional and aesthetic crisis for the field of composition, embodied in musical terms by a shift away from a Eurocentric paradigm to a cross-cultural one that embraced various “African
elements” within a framework of modernism and discourse of accessibility’. 1 Exchanging the word ‘composition’ with ‘opera production’ this seems an apt description of the crises local opera production have had to deal with since the 1980s and the concomitant new course it has taken during the past two decades.
At first glance, the production of opera in South Africa today has changed significantly since the days of the four Performing Arts Councils (PACs), CAPAB, NAPAC, PACT and PACOFS. These councils were established by South Africa’s Apartheid government and responsible for opera production in the country from 1963-1998.2 During the existence of
the Performing Arts Councils, opera production largely endeavoured to emulate the Western aesthetic and cultural models as closely as possible. Although government officials were not necessarily interested in opera production per se, Pooley describes the value of art music for the Apartheid government as that of ‘symbolic capital’.3 Art music symbolized European culture and because it was viewed to be of greater value than indigenous or local art,4 it was heavily subsidised by government. The political structures
1 Thomas Pooley, Composition in Crisis: Case Studies in South African Art Music 1980-2006. Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2008, p. 1.
2 Opera production by the PACs flourished predominantly during the 1970s and 80s. CAPAB, however, continued to produce opera on large scale until the mid-1990s.
3 Pooley, Composition in Crisis: Case Studies in South African Art Music 1980-2006, p. 18. 4 This attitude could also be found in the local classical music industry in the widespread and unqualified high appraisal of artists and music from abroad. The lack of confidence in home-grown talent (unless such talent had a career in Europe) and the subsequent lack of stature given to local artists has often been lamented by producers as a stumbling block in the development of local
underlying the country’s cultural policy were not conducive to the exploration of Africa’s indigenous cultures in the production of opera or any other cultural productions. However, due to the policies of the Apartheid government, widespread cultural boycotts by the international community resulted in the isolation of local arts production.5 Thus, by the
mid-1980s, opera in South Africa was not only cut off from international stimuli but also isolated from the creative possibilities of its own environment.
It is safe to assume that production trends will always change, but the social and political changes in South Africa during the past two decades have had an unprecedented and specific impact on the production of opera. With the change of political dispensation in 1994, the gates of creative possibility were flung wide open as producers had renewed artistic and intellectual access to the Western and African worlds. In theory, the new dispensation brought with it a freedom of association and the possibility to develop local opera production and composition into something new and unique. In practice, however, it was clear that opera production in South Africa was forced on a new course during which it had to face major practical challenges. The substantial government subsidies the PACs depended on in previous years were almost completely withdrawn6 and continuing to produce opera was just one of many immediate crises these formerly heavily subsidized institutions had to deal with. Thus, on a logistical level, realizing these new artistic possibilities proved to be very difficult.
The new era brought a host of challenges and opportunities, many of which can be traced in the stipulations of the White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage as published by the ANC government in June 1996.7 The practical implications of the policy advocated in the White Paper exposed South African composers and musicians working in the European classical idiom to increased structural pressures to reflect the indigenous cultures of their environment in their work. Subsidies for opera production were being increasingly granted
opera production. It was clear that, due to Apartheid, the authority of the ‘European experience’ had kept South African production and its audiences in a ‘colonial condition’. In the 1980s, the film critic Barry Ronge coined this tendency ‘overseazure’.
5 The cultural boycott is discussed on pp. 52-3 in Chapter 1.
6 No author, Programme notes: Cape Town Opera, 10th Anniversary Gala Concert, 19 April 2009. No page numbers.
7 This document has been partly referred to in Chapter 1 and will be quoted from and discussed in more detail during the course of this chapter.
on condition that greater demographic representation takes place in productions as well as audiences.
The challenges that faced opera production by the mid-1990s were not limited to political issues only. The artistic, managerial and aesthetic aspects of opera production were also unchartered territory. By 1990 some of the PACs had started to restructure their
organizations to include all racial and culture groups,8 and a growing number of African
opera singers made their presence felt. Angelo Gobbato mentions that by the early 1990s,
the existence of large numbers of exceptional operatic vocal talent among the black community could no longer be denied. What became a pressing artistic issue, however, was the creation of a suitable operatic repertoire for these singers and the possible adaptation of the production styles of the standard repertoire to create novel dramatic possibilities and credibilities, given the sudden transformation of operatic casts from being 98% white to casts being 98% black’.9
Furthermore, the effect of the new funding structures forced opera companies to become privatized organizations responsible for generating their own income. Opera companies now had to create viable business models along which they could operate and survive. Fifteen years into democracy, opera in South Africa seems to have consolidated, and in some cases presenting itself as an invigorated form of art. In 2009 four companies had been producing opera in the country for a number of years. They are Cape Town Opera10
and Isango Portabello (or Dimpho Di Kopane),11 both situated in Cape Town, and Opera
Africa12 and the Black Tie Ensemble,13 situated in Johannesburg and Pretoria respectively. All of these organizations operate as private companies and are dependent on subsidies in some or other way. The artistic directors of three of the four companies, Cape Town Opera (CTO),14 Opera Africa (OA)15 and the Black Tie Ensemble (BTE),16 have all worked in
8 Pooley, Composition in Crisis: Case Studies in South African Art Music 1980-2006, p. 19. 9 Angelo Gobbato, ‘History’, http://www.capetownopera.co.za/htm/history2008.html, accessed 25 July 2009.
10 See website on www.capetownopera.co.za.
11 This company also operates as Dimpho Di Kopane and produces film, theatre and opera. See website on www.ddk.etownship.co.za, or http://www.portobellopictures.com/About/Isango- Portobello.
12 See website on www.operaafrica.co.za. 13 See their website on www.blackties.co.za.
14 CTO’s current artistic director, Christine Crouse, was CAPAB’s last opera director.
similar positions under the previous dispensation. Isango Portabello’s director, Mark Donford-May, hails from the United Kingdom.
Reflecting on South Africa’s fifteen years of democracy has also revealed that, contrary to expectations and despite the changes brought about since the ANC has come to power, much in South Africa has stayed the same. This chapter will explore how a local opera house negotiates the continuation of a tradition with the ‘new set of rules’ that have governed opera production in South Africa since 1994. My choice for a case study has fallen on Cape Town Opera (CTO). This company not only reflects the pressing demands for change so pervasive in South African society as a whole, but also displays the signs of an ongoing tradition. Most of its artistic top management are individuals who held similar positions in the pre-1994 dispensation. Furthermore, the very core of the product they deliver, opera, is an art form rooted in European tradition. This chapter will investigate the dynamic between the opposing and complementary forces of change and tradition as practised by Cape Town Opera today. This includes the demands of sponsors, artists, managers and audiences, but also considers how the company operates in a multi-cultural environment in order to reflect its social realities. In exploring this dialectic between tradition and change, it is hoped that a hitherto unexplored aspect of opera indigenization will be revealed.
4.2 Tradition and change
South Africans have come to assume that the new dispensation ushered in by the ANC government of 1994 changed all aspects of daily life. Although it did so in a variety of spheres, reflecting on politics as well as cultural activities of the past fifteen years, it is clear that despite new policies and a number of substantial changes, the new governing structures often resemble their pre-1994 counterparts, resulting in far less change than anticipated and sometimes assumed. R.W. Johnson illustrates at length in his book South Africa’s Brave New World,17 how policies aimed at restructuring and addressing past
16 This company has been active since 1999 and was set up by former manager of PACT Opera, Neels Hansen and South Africa soprano Mimi Coertse.