Co-Opera: Opera on the road

Peeking inside a dark tin shed dubbed the Thomas Edmonds Studio, one sees the final dress rehearsal underway of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, with six young singers in full voice and a tiny orchestra to one side consisting of string quartet, flute, oboe and bassoon. Though scaled back, this is clearly a little gem of a production on the way – the swiftness, wit and vivacity are remarkable, far surpassing what might be expected from a company as small as this. But despite never having quite won the recognition it deserves, this is business as usual for Co-Opera. Australia’s only dedicated touring opera company has been taking productions like this around the country for 20 years now. This Cosi will tour eight regional centres across SA and NSW, do two shows in Melbourne’s Athenaeum Club, and wind up with a BYO ‘cabaret style’ performance back home in the same tin shed at the Showgrounds. Then comes Magic Flute, which Co-Opera takes to Roxby Downs, McLaren Vale and country Victoria before again finishing in Adelaide. Co-Opera nearly closed its doors three years ago, when funding from the Federal and State Governments dried up at the end of 2012. For a short time in 2013 the company received Federal money for touring Die Fledermaus, but that was it – until a private benefactor from Melbourne came in and saved the day. This was Hans Henkell, a businessman who had known the company since 2002 and seven years later had helped get them to the famous Maifestspiele arts festival in Wiesbaden, his hometown in Germany. Henkell immediately pledged $50,000 per year for three years “to provide a planning base for an active Co-Opera”, says Brian Chatterton, General Manager and Artistic Director. That arrangement ends this year, but late last year Henkell pledged $55,000 for a further three years. “He is literally providing the alternative to extinction,” Chatterton says. “Hans is one of the most generous benefactors, [and] there are those who consider it ironic that Adelaide’s touring opera company, the only Australian company to regularly tour to small-to-medium-sized towns, should owe its very existence to a Victorian. But no South Australian has ever shown comparable appreciation of our cultural mission. “And of course Hans’ own perceptions derive from his deep continuing cultural ties with Wiesbaden, where his brother runs the European arm of the Henkell Brothers investment business. It’s a very German-Australian commercial enterprise, and it’s all part of his mix of business interests.” Two other commercial sponsors stepped in to help: the Royal Commonwealth Society and SA Power Networks. Nevertheless, Chatterton is still irate about how both the State and Federal Governments abruptly defunded Co-Opera. “I think the message is clear,” he says. “There seems no point in continuing to spend the countless man-hours necessary to develop respectable applications without a major structural change in our fortunes. A change of State Government might trigger new hope.” Now it costs around $10,000 or upwards to buy in to one of Co-Opera’s productions, which is twice as much as when Co-Opera was funded. Nevertheless for that money you get the lot, no matter the distance from Adelaide. “The entire production is brought to your door,” explains Co-Opera’s website, including “flexible staging, scenery, lighting and sound”. The logistics of doing this are impressive. To tour Cosi, the company is taking six singers, eight instrumentalists and three technicians on the road for six weeks and covering some 4,600 kilometres. That’s more than the distance from Los Angeles to New York – there could be few opera companies anywhere in the world that clock up this kind of mileage. It used to be considerably more than this explains Chatterton: “In our post-public funding era, we do between 10 and 20 shows. For most of the 15 years with State and Federal public funding, we presented 40 to 50 regional performances a year plus at least 20 in big cities. Plus another 15 in a vibrant schools program. “Thus we provided full time professional paid work for 15 to 20 arts workers for five to seven months a year. Along with State Opera of SA chorus work, which we dovetailed our activities around, many of our singers lived entirely off that.” Chatterton has long argued that Co-Opera serves a much-needed bridge for young singers between their initial training and eventual employment by mainstage opera companies, a gap that might encompass years before their voices fully mature. Co-Opera doesn’t just help singers from Adelaide either; three of Cosi’s singers are from Sydney. And Chatterton pays them properly. “I insist on paying the singers and players no less than union rates,” he says. “Otherwise you just end up being another amateur theatre guild.” So Co-Opera has survived the hoops of fire, at least for the moment. For Chatterton the reason is because there is never any time to look back, only forwards. His next plans are to develop a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, with half the cast and rehearsals in Sydney and the rest here in Adelaide. Rehearsals start later this year. It will be a massive project, he promises. Co-Opera Cosi fan tutte, Saturday, May 23 and Sunday, May 24 The Magic Flute, Saturday, June 13 and Sunday, June 14 Thomas Edmonds Opera Studio, Adelaide Showground co-opera.com.au