Expert Meetings
From 2001, expert meetings – initially named 'working conferences' - were organised as part of the Yo! Opera Festival. The meetings enabled Yo! Opera to demonstrate its pioneering role. These meetings, lasting several days, offered ample opportunities for professional development, reflection, deepening of insights and networking in various fields: artistic, educational and communicative. The meetings had a lot to offer artistically, to singers, composers, directors, dramatists and librettists. From the start, education was a central theme of the conferences and many education workers from home and abroad have through the years attended one or several Expert Meetings during the festival.
The working conference of the first festival edition in 2001 still had a very loose planning. Each of the four days of the conference had its own theme. All of the four main elements in youth opera were dealt with: libretti, direction, composition and education. With the help of keynote speakers and through discussions and working groups, specific questions and problems were brought up. Also, the challenges and virtues of youth opera were analysed and opportunities for the propagation and improvement of the genre were explored. The meeting also left room for youth opera companies and others to present themselves and to broaden their networks. Speakers from the Netherlands and other countries added theoretical and practical expertise, from where discussions and talks on youth opera were started.
The 2003 working conference had one theme: quality improvement of the repertoire. This theme was suggested during the 2001 conference, which had as its conclusion that many opera producers faced a great demand for new and especially high quality repertoire for young audiences. Knowing that high quality youth theatre (especially in the Netherlands) is mainly thanks to the contribution of great youth theatre writers, the suggestion put forward was that the problems of youth opera in the field of repertoire lies with its compositions and composers. After all, composers are opera's story tellers and music is in fact the text that tells the story. This suggestion incited Yo! Opera in the build-up to the 2003 conference to find (young) composers at Dutch conservatories who could be tempted to commit themselves to the genre. By addressing its network of foreign partners (Staatsoper Stuttgart, the Finnish National Opera and the Belgian Music Theatre Transparant), Yo! Opera also contacted conservatories in other European countries. Eventually, the result was that students from conservatories in Utrecht, Amsterdam, The Hague, Antwerp (B) and Stuttgart (G) were willing to participate.
The 2003 conference was the start of the composition project Kloppend Hertz, which revolved around talent development: under the supervision of the Belgian composer Wim Henderickx, ten young composers were given the opportunity to present a short opera. Next to that, the conference featured talking sessions and portraits of composers; Hans Werner Henze talked about his work (amongst which the children's opera Pollicino), and education in relation to composition received a lot of attention. Finally, the working conference dealt with community opera, which would be an important theme of the 2005 edition.
By 2005, Yo! Opera's vision, festival programme and working methods had shifted considerably towards community opera. The Expert Meeting also incorporated this theme, especially from the perspective of community work. Both the sociologic and economic implications of community art and the role of the artist – composers, directors and librettists – were dealt with elaborately in various parts of the programme. Thanks to the fresh input of Opera in de Bus [Opera on the Bus] these themes benefited from not only a theoretical approach, but practical insights too. Speakers like Paul Schnabel, Peter Renshaw, Katie Tearle (Glyndebourne Opera), Paul van der Hoven (Utrecht University) shared the stage with Map Brouwer (Gemeentelijk Vervoersbedrijf Utrecht [Municipal Bus Company]) and several art students.
Kloppend Hertz was food for several theoretical researches, conducted by Marijke Hogenboom (lecturer artistic practice and development), Andreas Altenhof (Neukölner Oper Berlin) and Bettina Milz (dramatist). The results of Kloppend Hertz could be seen at Theater Kikker where composers like Paul Oomen, Matthias Konecny, Anke Brouwer, Zbigniew Wolny and Edwin van der Heide presented their works.
Both talent development and education were discussed in a session led by Cees Grimbergen, entitled Opera voor en door jonge mensen [Opera for and by Young People], which was attended by participants of many different projects. Youth of Amadeus College, Oosterlicht College, Glyndebourne Youth Groups, Netherlands Vocaal Laboratorium and Music Theatre Transparant talked and debated about what opera meant to them. Peter Renshaw – who later became Yo! Opera's 'conscience' and sounding board – rounded off this Expert Meeting by drawing several conclusions, which he presented to the audience in an intelligent and eloquent speech full of humour, inspiring many of those present.
The diversity and spectacle of large community projects set up by Yo! Opera led to a need to reconsider the voice itself in more detail. The voice is after all the most crucial means of communication in opera and that which makes it opera. The Expert Meeting in 2007 was entitled Vocal Creative Dialogue and it focused on the implications of and the relation between these three words. The Meeting started off with a video interview created by Anthony Heidweiller, in which he talks to one of the artists who inspires him most: Peter Sellars. Next to his international work as an opera director, Sellars is also active in community projects. In these projects, he combines his artistic skills with social engagement. In the interview shown, Sellars elaborates on the meaning of the words vocal, creativity and dialogue. The video was an introduction to the discussion following it, led by Soheila Najand. She talked about the fast changing social and cultural context in this world and the consequences this may have to the artist and his work. The framework used in this first session of the Meeting was inspiring, but complex. It dealt with the artist using his special 'voice' in his conversation with society.
Kloppend Hertz again received ample attention during this Meeting. Focussing on the collective working processes which had been realised within this project – which initially revolved around composing only – attendants spoke about new sounds, shapes, roles and responsibilities of the composer. Nirav Christophe (lecturer theatrical making processes), Eugene van Erven (researcher in community arts) and the previously mentioned Marijke Hogenboom discussed the advantages and pitfalls of collaboration projects. Their discussion was an example of a creative dialogue: a dialogue to be entered into by the composer who is involved in community opera.
In 2005, festival producer and managing director Saskia van de Ree was fascinated with the working methods used by a British institution, called Creative Partnerships. She brought their ideas to Utrecht and incorporated them into the work of Yo! Opera. At the 2007 Meeting, guest speaker Steve Moffit of the London branch of Creative Partnerships talked about the longlasting relationships between artists and schools he had brought about. Next to that, he led an inspiring workshop to participants of the Meeting.
At the end of the Meeting, several examples were presented of different ways in which youth opera can be presented thanks to collaborations between companies or opera houses and governments or social partners. Examples from Sweden (Malmö Operaverkstan) and the Netherlands (Xynix Opera and the Wervelwind Ensemble) gave cause for discussion.
The Expert Meeting in 2009 had a different set-up from those in previous years. Earlier Meetings had already served a networking purpose, but it was now emphasized further. During the Meeting all participants were expressly invited to 'dream aloud' and to express their wishes on their work and their passion – opera and music.The Yo! Opera Meeting of 2009 was started by a lecture on the position of musicians in a fast changing society. Rineke Smilde, lecturer Lifelong Learning in Music & the Arts at Hanzehogeschool Groningen and the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, obtained her doctorate in 2008 with a thesis on 'lifelong learning' by musicians. After her presentation, Renee Jonker - Smilde's colleague in The Hague – led a debate with more than twenty guests.
The educational music project De Zingende Stad [The City Sings] was the subject of a presentation on opera and new media. During the Meeting, music technician Henk van Engelen, music teacher Allerd van den Bremen and dramatist Geert van Boxtel talked about the backgrounds and objectives of this project, using brief demonstrations to illustrate it.
Three parallel sessions were organised to allow youth, young professionals and education experts to 'dream aloud' on the future of opera. In this first part of three debates held during the Meeting, education experts focused especially on the question how opera can address young audiences in the most powerful way. Secondly, pupils from three secondary schools – all participants in one of Yo! Opera's projects presented at the festival – talked about the show they participated in. Gerrit Rietveld College (Utrecht) was working on the production De Operaflat; Globe College in Utrecht created Wegwijzers [Signposts] and Oosterlicht College (Nieuwegein) realised the production Blow your Mind, together with VocaalLab. The third and final part of the series of debates was a discussion between young opera makers about their attitude towards established institutes, their audience, hierarchical working structures, forces dominating the music theatre landscape and dead and living writers.
The Meeting also featured the first edition of Operatie Muziektheater [Operation Music Theatre]. It was organised in a collaboration between Nederlands Fonds voor de Podiumkunsten [Netherlands Funds for Performing Arts], Theater Institituut Nederland, Muziekcentrum Nederland and Yo! Opera. This first edition was the start of a series of debates on the future of opera and music theatre in the Netherlands. Over 150 people participated in an exciting, colourful and heated conversation on talent development, in which three very relevant questions were brought up: 'Who are our young makers? Are established institutions sufficiently equipped for talent development? What can be improved about the various stages of talent development?'
The programme for the Yo! Opera Expert Meeting in 2009 offered three presentations on different opera experiments, the results of which could be discussed with their creators. Each experiment had its own character or perspective. Supermarktsongspiel [Super Market Songspiel] was directed by Bart Oomen and used music by Kurt Weill. It combined video fragments from interviews with cashiers in a theatrical setting with opera singers playing the role of these very same cashiers in a super market. The workshop Music Laboratory in the Classroom revolved around the question how to make texts and music together with children. The Wervelwind Ensemble gave a (musical) presentation which was afterwards the subject of a discussion led by composer and theatre maker James Redwood. The ideas it resulted in were used in a subsequent workshop. Xynix Opera and Zapp String Quartet finally presented a work in progress: the opera Feeks (No Fear for Shakespeare) based on The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare. In this work, they experimented on the merging of text and music in a collaboration between classically trained singers and a jazz string quartet.
The Expert Meeting at the final edition of the Yo! Opera Festival was the result of a partnership with RESEO, a network Yo! Opera had been part of for years. RESEO is an abbreviation, for European Network for Opera and Dance Education. RESEO organises a biennial conference on current themes in opera and dance education. In 2011, it chose to hold its conference in Utrecht because of the efforts made by Yo! Opera in the field of digital media. Several aspects had given cause to this choice of location: De Zingende Stad [The City Sings], the online creation environment of De Operaflat and the innovative set-up of the previous festival edition, which had made use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The title of the conference was Digital Dynamics and it was organised by RESEO and Yo! Opera jointly.
More than 80 professionals from various European countries – amongst which the Netherlands – attended the conference and the festival. Yo! Opera had the opportunity to present its mission and developments and to emphasize the need to use new and social media in opera. Other Dutch institutions devoted to new media presented exciting ideas and RESEO's member organisations together set up a true digital fair. Various workshops and presentations offered new insights, ideas, concrete examples of ways in which art production, distribution, and marketing might benefit from digital media. And of course there was ample room for reflection on what these media could mean to the most important of RESEO's themes: education.
In style with the theme of the final expert meeting as part of the Yo! Opera Festival, the reader is referred to the website of RESEO for further information on the conference.
The conference was a great success, for both RESEO and Yo! Opera. Being the host of the most important international network in the field of opera education has been a great honour to Yo! Opera and its staff, and a dignified conclusion to its work. Once and for all, the conference and its attendants pointed out the value of institutions such as Yo! Opera, which was a true pioneer in the complex but interesting field of opera education.
The working conference of the first festival edition in 2001 still had a very loose planning. Each of the four days of the conference had its own theme. All of the four main elements in youth opera were dealt with: libretti, direction, composition and education. With the help of keynote speakers and through discussions and working groups, specific questions and problems were brought up. Also, the challenges and virtues of youth opera were analysed and opportunities for the propagation and improvement of the genre were explored. The meeting also left room for youth opera companies and others to present themselves and to broaden their networks. Speakers from the Netherlands and other countries added theoretical and practical expertise, from where discussions and talks on youth opera were started.
The 2003 working conference had one theme: quality improvement of the repertoire. This theme was suggested during the 2001 conference, which had as its conclusion that many opera producers faced a great demand for new and especially high quality repertoire for young audiences. Knowing that high quality youth theatre (especially in the Netherlands) is mainly thanks to the contribution of great youth theatre writers, the suggestion put forward was that the problems of youth opera in the field of repertoire lies with its compositions and composers. After all, composers are opera's story tellers and music is in fact the text that tells the story. This suggestion incited Yo! Opera in the build-up to the 2003 conference to find (young) composers at Dutch conservatories who could be tempted to commit themselves to the genre. By addressing its network of foreign partners (Staatsoper Stuttgart, the Finnish National Opera and the Belgian Music Theatre Transparant), Yo! Opera also contacted conservatories in other European countries. Eventually, the result was that students from conservatories in Utrecht, Amsterdam, The Hague, Antwerp (B) and Stuttgart (G) were willing to participate.
The 2003 conference was the start of the composition project Kloppend Hertz, which revolved around talent development: under the supervision of the Belgian composer Wim Henderickx, ten young composers were given the opportunity to present a short opera. Next to that, the conference featured talking sessions and portraits of composers; Hans Werner Henze talked about his work (amongst which the children's opera Pollicino), and education in relation to composition received a lot of attention. Finally, the working conference dealt with community opera, which would be an important theme of the 2005 edition.
By 2005, Yo! Opera's vision, festival programme and working methods had shifted considerably towards community opera. The Expert Meeting also incorporated this theme, especially from the perspective of community work. Both the sociologic and economic implications of community art and the role of the artist – composers, directors and librettists – were dealt with elaborately in various parts of the programme. Thanks to the fresh input of Opera in de Bus [Opera on the Bus] these themes benefited from not only a theoretical approach, but practical insights too. Speakers like Paul Schnabel, Peter Renshaw, Katie Tearle (Glyndebourne Opera), Paul van der Hoven (Utrecht University) shared the stage with Map Brouwer (Gemeentelijk Vervoersbedrijf Utrecht [Municipal Bus Company]) and several art students.
Kloppend Hertz was food for several theoretical researches, conducted by Marijke Hogenboom (lecturer artistic practice and development), Andreas Altenhof (Neukölner Oper Berlin) and Bettina Milz (dramatist). The results of Kloppend Hertz could be seen at Theater Kikker where composers like Paul Oomen, Matthias Konecny, Anke Brouwer, Zbigniew Wolny and Edwin van der Heide presented their works.
Both talent development and education were discussed in a session led by Cees Grimbergen, entitled Opera voor en door jonge mensen [Opera for and by Young People], which was attended by participants of many different projects. Youth of Amadeus College, Oosterlicht College, Glyndebourne Youth Groups, Netherlands Vocaal Laboratorium and Music Theatre Transparant talked and debated about what opera meant to them. Peter Renshaw – who later became Yo! Opera's 'conscience' and sounding board – rounded off this Expert Meeting by drawing several conclusions, which he presented to the audience in an intelligent and eloquent speech full of humour, inspiring many of those present.
The diversity and spectacle of large community projects set up by Yo! Opera led to a need to reconsider the voice itself in more detail. The voice is after all the most crucial means of communication in opera and that which makes it opera. The Expert Meeting in 2007 was entitled Vocal Creative Dialogue and it focused on the implications of and the relation between these three words. The Meeting started off with a video interview created by Anthony Heidweiller, in which he talks to one of the artists who inspires him most: Peter Sellars. Next to his international work as an opera director, Sellars is also active in community projects. In these projects, he combines his artistic skills with social engagement. In the interview shown, Sellars elaborates on the meaning of the words vocal, creativity and dialogue. The video was an introduction to the discussion following it, led by Soheila Najand. She talked about the fast changing social and cultural context in this world and the consequences this may have to the artist and his work. The framework used in this first session of the Meeting was inspiring, but complex. It dealt with the artist using his special 'voice' in his conversation with society.
Kloppend Hertz again received ample attention during this Meeting. Focussing on the collective working processes which had been realised within this project – which initially revolved around composing only – attendants spoke about new sounds, shapes, roles and responsibilities of the composer. Nirav Christophe (lecturer theatrical making processes), Eugene van Erven (researcher in community arts) and the previously mentioned Marijke Hogenboom discussed the advantages and pitfalls of collaboration projects. Their discussion was an example of a creative dialogue: a dialogue to be entered into by the composer who is involved in community opera.
In 2005, festival producer and managing director Saskia van de Ree was fascinated with the working methods used by a British institution, called Creative Partnerships. She brought their ideas to Utrecht and incorporated them into the work of Yo! Opera. At the 2007 Meeting, guest speaker Steve Moffit of the London branch of Creative Partnerships talked about the longlasting relationships between artists and schools he had brought about. Next to that, he led an inspiring workshop to participants of the Meeting.
At the end of the Meeting, several examples were presented of different ways in which youth opera can be presented thanks to collaborations between companies or opera houses and governments or social partners. Examples from Sweden (Malmö Operaverkstan) and the Netherlands (Xynix Opera and the Wervelwind Ensemble) gave cause for discussion.
The Expert Meeting in 2009 had a different set-up from those in previous years. Earlier Meetings had already served a networking purpose, but it was now emphasized further. During the Meeting all participants were expressly invited to 'dream aloud' and to express their wishes on their work and their passion – opera and music.The Yo! Opera Meeting of 2009 was started by a lecture on the position of musicians in a fast changing society. Rineke Smilde, lecturer Lifelong Learning in Music & the Arts at Hanzehogeschool Groningen and the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, obtained her doctorate in 2008 with a thesis on 'lifelong learning' by musicians. After her presentation, Renee Jonker - Smilde's colleague in The Hague – led a debate with more than twenty guests.
The educational music project De Zingende Stad [The City Sings] was the subject of a presentation on opera and new media. During the Meeting, music technician Henk van Engelen, music teacher Allerd van den Bremen and dramatist Geert van Boxtel talked about the backgrounds and objectives of this project, using brief demonstrations to illustrate it.
Three parallel sessions were organised to allow youth, young professionals and education experts to 'dream aloud' on the future of opera. In this first part of three debates held during the Meeting, education experts focused especially on the question how opera can address young audiences in the most powerful way. Secondly, pupils from three secondary schools – all participants in one of Yo! Opera's projects presented at the festival – talked about the show they participated in. Gerrit Rietveld College (Utrecht) was working on the production De Operaflat; Globe College in Utrecht created Wegwijzers [Signposts] and Oosterlicht College (Nieuwegein) realised the production Blow your Mind, together with VocaalLab. The third and final part of the series of debates was a discussion between young opera makers about their attitude towards established institutes, their audience, hierarchical working structures, forces dominating the music theatre landscape and dead and living writers.
The Meeting also featured the first edition of Operatie Muziektheater [Operation Music Theatre]. It was organised in a collaboration between Nederlands Fonds voor de Podiumkunsten [Netherlands Funds for Performing Arts], Theater Institituut Nederland, Muziekcentrum Nederland and Yo! Opera. This first edition was the start of a series of debates on the future of opera and music theatre in the Netherlands. Over 150 people participated in an exciting, colourful and heated conversation on talent development, in which three very relevant questions were brought up: 'Who are our young makers? Are established institutions sufficiently equipped for talent development? What can be improved about the various stages of talent development?'
The programme for the Yo! Opera Expert Meeting in 2009 offered three presentations on different opera experiments, the results of which could be discussed with their creators. Each experiment had its own character or perspective. Supermarktsongspiel [Super Market Songspiel] was directed by Bart Oomen and used music by Kurt Weill. It combined video fragments from interviews with cashiers in a theatrical setting with opera singers playing the role of these very same cashiers in a super market. The workshop Music Laboratory in the Classroom revolved around the question how to make texts and music together with children. The Wervelwind Ensemble gave a (musical) presentation which was afterwards the subject of a discussion led by composer and theatre maker James Redwood. The ideas it resulted in were used in a subsequent workshop. Xynix Opera and Zapp String Quartet finally presented a work in progress: the opera Feeks (No Fear for Shakespeare) based on The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare. In this work, they experimented on the merging of text and music in a collaboration between classically trained singers and a jazz string quartet.
The Expert Meeting at the final edition of the Yo! Opera Festival was the result of a partnership with RESEO, a network Yo! Opera had been part of for years. RESEO is an abbreviation, for European Network for Opera and Dance Education. RESEO organises a biennial conference on current themes in opera and dance education. In 2011, it chose to hold its conference in Utrecht because of the efforts made by Yo! Opera in the field of digital media. Several aspects had given cause to this choice of location: De Zingende Stad [The City Sings], the online creation environment of De Operaflat and the innovative set-up of the previous festival edition, which had made use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The title of the conference was Digital Dynamics and it was organised by RESEO and Yo! Opera jointly.
More than 80 professionals from various European countries – amongst which the Netherlands – attended the conference and the festival. Yo! Opera had the opportunity to present its mission and developments and to emphasize the need to use new and social media in opera. Other Dutch institutions devoted to new media presented exciting ideas and RESEO's member organisations together set up a true digital fair. Various workshops and presentations offered new insights, ideas, concrete examples of ways in which art production, distribution, and marketing might benefit from digital media. And of course there was ample room for reflection on what these media could mean to the most important of RESEO's themes: education.
In style with the theme of the final expert meeting as part of the Yo! Opera Festival, the reader is referred to the website of RESEO for further information on the conference.
The conference was a great success, for both RESEO and Yo! Opera. Being the host of the most important international network in the field of opera education has been a great honour to Yo! Opera and its staff, and a dignified conclusion to its work. Once and for all, the conference and its attendants pointed out the value of institutions such as Yo! Opera, which was a true pioneer in the complex but interesting field of opera education.