ROYAL OPERA HOUSE UPDATE.

The Royal Ballet has taken a terrible battering since the Royal Opera House closed for rebuilding in July 1997. By the end of last year, dancers were petitioning audiences to write to the Minister of Culture and the chairman of the Royal Opera House to protest the way performers were being treated. Nine leading conductors wrote, in a letter to the Times of London, "If the performers had been responsible for the mismanagement of the ROH, it would be easier to understand the present situation, but it is not they who have brought disrepute to the place. On the contrary, many, many performances have been given by them which have been the envy of the world."

Every move at the Royal Opera House--the rows, the official reprimands, the rapid exits of management heads [see accompanying box]--was extensively covered by the British press. Michael Kaiser, the newly appointed chief executive, said wryly on his arrival from New York that he was impressed by the interest shown: "Back home, I wouldn't expect the departure of a marketing officer to make front page news--but then, I guess Keith Cooper was rather a star of The House [the TV documentary series about the Royal Opera House shown by the BBC and PBS in 1997]."

Although the fly-on-the-wall documentary series was not the cause of the Royal Opera House's problems, it alerted a broad viewing public to backstage crises, financial brinkmanship, and seat-of-the-pants management decisions. So why did those in charge of the ROH consent to its screening? According to insiders, they thought viewers would appreciate the buildup to a performance and sympathize with the difficulties caused by underfunding. The artistic excellence of the end result--the ballet and opera productions--would justify the behind-the-scenes chaos. Government and private sponsors would be persuaded to give generously to the rebuilding fund, once they saw how antiquated working conditions were.

What went wrong, says Cooper (the sacked head of marketing), was that so few people were able to see the productions, mounted with the aid of public subsidy. Seat prices, especially for opera, were so high that only corporate sponsors could afford them. Loyal ballet supporters had largely receded, like an ebbing tide, to the very back of the amphitheater. ROH regulars knew where and how to find the cheaper seats, but newcomers were deterred by expectations that the Opera House was the exclusive preserve of "toffs."

This out-of-date slang for a rich, snobbish, upper-class person (the American equivalent used to be "swell") was resurrected by British tabloid newspapers when the Opera House was given 78.5 million [pounds sterling] from the national lottery for its redevelopment. The lottery had just come onstream in July 1995, and the ROH was by far the largest recipient of this new pool of public money. The popular papers, fighting each other for circulation, were quick to point out that the operagoing rich would benefit from poor people's lottery stakes.

Envy and resentment were easily stirred up, fueled by the defensive arrogance of ROH top management figures, who implied that the Opera House deserved (as well as needed) large amounts of extra money. "We took our eye off the ball," admits Cooper. "All our energies went into lobbying and fund-raising for the building. We omitted to make our case for artistic excellence. We relied on our past reputation and overlooked the fact that fewer and fewer people actually saw our productions, either in the theater or on TV. Viewers of The House couldn't get to see what was trailed in front of them, so no wonder they were unsympathetic."

Most of the hostile press coverage was aimed at the ROH administration and at the elitist image of opera: ballet was rarely mentioned. However, the Royal Ballet's stock suffered by association, and Sir Anthony Dowell, the company's reclusive artistic director, made no public statements in its defense. Dowell never pleaded the case for ballet at any political level, say insiders. His strategy for the company was simply survival, while government and board members argued obsessively about opera. Opera director Nicholas Payne resigned and Musical Director Bernard Haitink threatened to leave at the height of the crisis, but Dowell kept his head down.

The ballet company had been damaged by the ROH's failure to find an alternative home theater for the two years during which the Covent Garden site was being redeveloped. Among the options (briefly) contemplated was the mothballing of both companies, ballet and opera, for the closure period, or restricting them to small productions. In order to keep the corps de ballet together, Dowell proposed performing popular classics in large theaters, on tour abroad, and in London.

London, however, crammed with musicals, has very few available theaters. Most of the venues in which the Royal Ballet has appeared in the past eighteen months have not been well suited to ballets, especially the "heritage" repertory of Marius Petipa, Frederick Ashton, and Ninette de Valois. The first big theater chosen, the Apollo, Hammersmith, in West London, lost the company money and prestige; badly marketed, the season did not attract audiences new to ballet and alienated the Opera House in-crowd.

Meanwhile, English National Ballet seized the high ground by marketing itself as the People's Ballet. Artistic director Derek Deane presented its London seasons in the Royal Albert Hall opposite Kensington Palace, where ENB's former patron, Princess Diana, used to live. Deane achieved massive publicity and audiences by putting on outsized productions of Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet in the round. The artistic success of the productions possibly mattered less to Britain's New Labour supporters than ENB's popular appeal. The Royal Ballet continued to be perceived as elitist.

The Labour government came into power in 1997 with an ambivalent attitude toward the arts. Although its election manifesto stated that culture, like education, was part of its core agenda, the emphasis had to be on accessibility. New Labour was not prepared to fund centers of excellence if they excluded those who did not appreciate them. State subsidy had to be justified in terms of value for money--and the Arts Council (which has distributed government arts funding since the 1940s) was no longer to be trusted to make decisions without close scrutiny.

The Arts Council was one of the new government's first sacrificial victims, its staff and power base under threat. The Royal Opera House also had to be seen to suffer. There was a suspicion that the grandees on its board had been part of a Conservative establishment, well placed to extract money out of state and corporate business funds to cover any budget difficulties. The unions were also suspected of holding the ROH management hostage, with unreasonable, out-of-date working practices. The price for a new, lottery-funded Opera House would have to be a purge of old habits and expectations.

The purge has proved extremely painful, ruining careers and reputations. As Kaiser has discovered: "This is a hurting organization right now, not an arrogant one. One of the things that could have assuaged the problems of the last eighteen months would have been people talking excitedly about what the new building would do. Instead, they talked about how many executive directors had left, who did what to whom, and whose fault the mess was." This reaction, analyzing the past instead of the future, is typical of troubled organizations, Kaiser says.

He arrived at his post, the fourth executive director in two years, at the height of the crisis in November 1998. ROH chairman Sir Colin Southgate had told the unions that if they could not agree to new working conditions, he would close the ballet and opera companies until the new Opera House opened. He also told Culture Minister Chris Smith that cutbacks and new contracts would not save the ROH unless the government doubled its subsidy. Private donors, including Lord Sainsbury (married to former Royal Ballet dancer Anya Linden), would withdraw promised funds if the companies were no longer viable.

Sainsbury, at the instigation of the dancers, commissioned a feasibility study into funding the Royal Ballet as an independent entity. Many of the dancers wanted to break away from ROH management, as Birmingham Royal Ballet had succeeded in doing, after moving its base to Birmingham in the Midlands. Five male dancers announced their intention to leave to join former principal dancer Tetsuya Kumakawa in a new group, to be funded with Japanese money. Morale among remaining Royal Ballet dancers hit rock bottom as they and their union, Equity, refused to accept new contracts limiting performances to thirty-six weeks a year.

Sainsbury told the dancers that going it alone was not an option. But the ROH board (accused of being staggeringly ignorant about how a ballet company operates) was persuaded to offer performers acceptable year-round contracts; the backstage staff fared less well. New contracts come into effect in September 1999, in preparation for the opening of the rebuilt Opera House in December 1999. The government has conceded an extra 5.5 million [pounds sterling] to tide the ROH over until reopening, and a larger grant of 20 million [pounds sterling], instead of 14 million [pounds sterling], for the year 2000.

The immediate crisis is over. All that remains is for Kaiser to turn the organization around financially and to work with a new ROH artistic director in restoring its artistic credibility. (Dowell continues as artistic director of the Royal Ballet.) Kaiser is confident (see In the News, Dance Magazine, December 1998) that from now on, public perceptions will change as the redeveloped Opera House starts generating excitement instead of resentment. "Physically, it is going to be a lot more alluring and accessible," he promises. "People will want to go inside, as part of the Covent Garden experience. We'll be offering free concerts and master classes, trying to break down the mistrust of people who feel that an opera house is not for them."

The focus must be on programming and performances, not just on the new building, Kaiser explains. "Lower ticket prices when we reopen won't make any difference if people don't think that they're going to enjoy what they see," he says. He is careful not to intrude on Dowell's territory of artistic decision-making, but he points out that from his own experience managing American Ballet Theatre, the Royal Ballet has to do the same balancing act with its repertory. "As well as the traditional full-length ballets and modern heritage ones," he says, "they have to find new choreography. And there's a direct relation between money and invention. The changing economics of dance mean that it's hard to afford the time and money to create a body of new work from which the seminal ballets of the next century will emerge."

Kaiser is full of ideas about how future planning can be improved, but the Royal Ballet will have to effect a major recovery from its ailing reputation and self-esteem. There have been few signs of leadership from within its ranks; its staff is battle-weary from years of being sidelined in favor of opera. The Opera House closure period has undermined its morale. The Royal Ballet School, itself the subject of harsh criticism, has provided few new recruits to replace those who want to leave. But Kaiser assures those who despair at the low state of the ROH's fortunes that all this has happened before to other troubled organizations, and they have pulled through.