Airport Culture and the Art of Belonging
When Every Stage Looks the Same
Land in Miami. Land in Bahrain. The terminal looks the same. Sir David Pountney fears opera is drifting toward the same fate — a world of gleaming, interchangeable spaces where nothing quite belongs to anywhere. The logic behind co-productions is easy to understand: stagings are costly, and sharing them across three or four cities spreads the expense. A production conceived in one house travels to the next, gathering passport stamps as it goes. On the balance sheet, it makes perfect sense.
The Cost of Speaking to Everyone
But art keeps a different set of accounts. “You can’t be specific to an audience,” Pountney warns, “if your production has just come from three other completely different places.” Something essential thins out in transit. The staging that speaks to everyone, everywhere, risks speaking intimately to no one at all. He calls it airport culture — the slow homogenizing of an art form that once drew its power from the particular. Because audiences are not identical, and they never were. In Europe, opera-goers arrive already knowing the story in their bones. They know Mimì’s hand will brush against Rodolfo’s in the darkness of La Bohème. That moment needs no explanation. What they want is something more — a layer of interpretation, a conversation with the work rather than a simple retelling.
The Clever Trick That Ran Its Course
For years, that hunger produced what Pountney terms parallel commentary: productions that ran an ironic or distanced remark alongside the music, a second voice murmuring against the original. It was clever. It was fashionable. And, he believes, it has run its course. Parallel commentary flourished largely because companies kept reviving the same handful of titles. Starved of genuinely new work, directors dressed old pieces in ever stranger clothes — a spaceship here, an ironic gloss there — to keep themselves and their audiences awake. A richer answer was always available: create something new instead. Beneath all the theory lies a simple conviction: storytelling is the root of everything. “That’s ultimately what theatre is,” Pountney says. The great popular works — the Aidas, the Carmens, the Traviatas — endure not through gimmickry but because they carry unforgettable stories, told with feeling to people who came to be moved.
Efficiency Is Not Enough
Endlessly importing productions from elsewhere is no recipe for engaging the audience actually sitting before you. Managements must take care, Pountney insists. A staging made for one house, one city, one particular gathering of listeners can hold a charge that a well-travelled import never quite recovers. The airport promises efficiency. The theatre promises belonging. And in an art form recreated fresh each night, for these people, in this place, Pountney reminds us where opera’s true home has always been — not in the seamless sameness of everywhere, but in the irreplaceable specificity of somewhere.
