My favourite TV show is Takeshi’s Castle. It is my favourite show of all time, and at this rate, for all time. It is a Japanese game show from the late 80’s, where an initial one hundred contestants throw themselves at various absurdist obstacle courses, in an attempt to overthrow the apparent antagonist Count Takeshi. I do not know why they wish to overthrow this Count – nor do I wish to know. Each episode runs for 30 minutes, and consists of participants shouting something to camera, before attempting the given course. The majority fail in their attempts. The show is in Japanese, but for the UK distribution, a commentary is provided by the actor and presenter Craig Charles, who understands no Japanese. Charles reacts to the visual tragedy spontaneously, along with the viewing audience. The original show ran for 3 seasons, with a handful of specials, spin-offs and reboots since, and has inspired much parody and pastiche. Takeshi’s Castle’s non-verbal character gives it an international appeal.
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A few weeks back, I was delighted to wake up to news that a famous actor’s blasé remarks had ignited much impassioned discussion about the state of dramatic and classically trained fine arts. Timothée Chalamet (who you may know from theatrical releases such as Dune: Part One, Dune: Part Two, Marty Supreme, and the upcoming feature, Dune: Part Three) had a conversation with fellow A-lister Matthew McConaughey for Variety magazine. The full conversation is over an hour, but 48 minutes in, they said the following:
MM: “in this day of shorter attention spans, and vertical 12 second spots, are we losing attention and patience for act ones? Because it’s the first thing that gets cut. It’s the first thing that studios want to get rid [of]. I’m seeing act two, more and more, start on fricking page 12…it feels abbreviated to me. Am I feeling something?”
TC: “I think you are, but…I also think there’s a sort of reverse thing going on too now…people that are younger than me(…) are desiring things that are more patient and that pull you in. I saw another article saying that Gen Z is a bigger movie-going audience than a millennial audience(…) Frankenstein — which is a hugely popular movie this year — I didn’t think that pacing was extraordinarily fast, but it pulled people in, you know? But it does take you having to wave a flag of “hey, this is a serious movie” and some people want to be entertained quickly.
I’m really right in the middle, Matthew, ‘cause I admire people, and I’ve done it myself, [who] go on a talk show and go “hey, we gotta keep movie theatre’s alive…we gotta keep this genre alive.” Another part of me feels like, if people wanna see it, like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, they’re gonna go see it… I don’t wanna be working in ballet or opera, or things where it’s like “hey keep this thing alive” even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there…[audience giggles]…I just lost 14 cents in viewership”
For the sake of good faith and generating food for thought, let’s interpret Chalamet’s point generously. Both actors are touching on important subjects: McConaughey expresses concern for the demise of long-form narratives. Chalamet highlights the ongoing challenge of telling meaningful, sophisticated stories that connect with sufficiently broad audiences, ensuring financial sustainability. Ironically, the presence of a studio audience meant that the actors were under pressure to be fairly entertaining and light-hearted, discouraging them from having the more austere, somber exchange required to do these issues justice. You can see this in Chalamet’s more complete answer above, as opposed to the 10-second soundbite doing the rounds. It has been pointed out elsewhere that Chalamet’s mother trained as a ballerina — he is aware that people care about the medium. His follow-up dig “I just lost 14 cents in viewership” is the crucial giveaway to what he is getting at here. It’s not that “no one cares” — it’s that too few care.
These art forms — these culture industries — are not profitable. The majority of opera and ballet companies are not attracting the audiences necessary to cover the high costs of production. In ambitious productions, even sell-out runs can fail to meet the costs. Workers and administrators seem to be in perpetual tension about strapped budgets and pay. For the immense investments of time and effort into the extraordinary skillsets of the artists and craftspeople…their compensation lingers behind counterparts in musicals and movies, let alone professions beyond the arts. The companies are typically registered charities, receiving a medley of tax-breaks, public funding and philanthropic support in order to just break even. I am the last person to concede that profitability is the be-all-and-end-all, but the money has to come from somewhere, so the artforms must make a serious (and often, political) case for themselves.
Backlash to Chalamet’s remarks came swift and from all angles. The major opera houses and ballet companies’ social media managers were out in force, using the opportunity to celebrate how much their craft means to so many. Others observed that Chalamet’s industry is almost entirely downstream of opera, the original gesamtkunstwerk, and he shouldn’t flippantly dismiss a vital heritage. Most amusingly, many have asked the very pertinent question “who says that you could actually make it in opera or ballet anyway, Mr Chalamet?” These are virtuosic disciplines, and require thousands of hours of dedicated training before artists are even eligible for the hyper-competitive profession. Perhaps actor Chalamet secretly trains in these fields, longing for the day where his tours en l’air are clean enough to make the leap from Hollywood to Covent Garden…
All of the above are perfectly just rebukes to the actor’s apathy. There were some responses, however, that gave me pause for thought. They typically went along the following lines “two, three centuries from now…no one will remember Chalamet, while we will still be celebrating Don Giovanni and Swan Lake” Aside from being a little mean-spirited (I happen to think that Villeneuve’s Dune movies are very, very good!), I wouldn’t be so bullish about the apparent immortality of our beloved Mozart and Tchaikovsky…
I recall a workshop from my school years: we were introduced to a set of gamelan, the indigenous music of several Indonesian islands. The workshop leader told us of his time travelling Java, and his exchanges with a village chieftain, who enthusiastically shared performances of gamelan with his western guest. This deeply moved the workshop leader , who in turn wished to share something from his musical upbringing. He played some Beethoven for the village chief. The 5th symphony, if memory serves. It is one of the most iconic and instantly gripping works of music, and this was the village chief’s first exposure to western art music.
The chief’s response? I remember it so well — “he didn’t seem to care at all”. Our chief was utterly unmoved. Beethoven Five did nothing for him. This is of course anecdotal, and the chief wasn’t listening to it in the optimal circumstances, which would have involved whisking him off to one of the great concert halls, complete with live orchestra. I do think that there’s an underlying point, however, that cannot be taken lightly. Our artistic gestation — the ways of making art and music that we are exposed to in our upbringings and education — can define our tastes and understanding for the rest of our lives. Without learnt background knowledge and context to reference, a single example of any unfamiliar field is likely to only be bewildering. If the chieftain spends his time exclusively with gamelan, then his concept of tuning is entirely different, save for the octave. Gamelan scales divide the octave into 5 or 7 equidistant pitches, as opposed to our 12 divisions. Beethoven’s decisive use of C minor would be so alien — how would the chief know that we associate this key with pathos? Gamelan might emotionally configure dun-dun-dun-duuun as code for something entirely different to the knocking of fate. For us in the west, the Fifth Symphony likely strikes as immediately affecting because its influence permeates our mass culture — film scores, video games, cartoons, adverts…200 years on, Beethoven’s style has an extensive memetic legacy. We recognise and feel its impact because we’ve already experienced its cultural background radiation — we can intellectually and emotionally place it in our mind-webs of understanding. Repetition remains the mother of learning. Of course, it’s never too late to broaden one’s horizons: my octogenarian grandmother, after a lifetime of no classical music, will now gladly watch a Mahler symphony broadcast, having been immersed/bludgeoned with classical music by yours truly in recent years. The point remains: culture must be cultivated, and specialist cultures especially so. How many of us can name half-a-dozen of the general techniques and moves required of a ballet dancer? How many can list the different operatic voice types, or relay the gist of Tosca’s story? I can’t. I should be able to — but I still can’t, despite my relatively extensive (and expensive) education in music, and enthusiasm for the fields. That’s telling of our broader insight and access to these cultural habitats (as well as my own personal shortcomings — forgive me Puccini!)
There’s a more insidious perception that holds opera and ballet back, compared to the mass appeal of the blockbuster film. Who is opera and ballet for? Ideally everyone, sure — but who is it actually, presently for? Who is regularly accessing and enjoying a night at the opera? Because it’s not me. For all my love of the music and the fantastic productions…it’s just too expensive. Writing from my home an hour outside of costly London, even with access to heavy discounts and concessions, there is the sheer cost and time of simply getting to the few city centres that can sustain the companies (I am privileged to have grown up merely an hour from London!). From the half dozen times that I have been fortunate enough to attend a regional opera house, one gets the sense that a lot of your fellow punters are indeed regulars, and that they hail from…a particular socioeconomic bracket. It’s not rocket science to figure out which bracket I’m talking about, considering that seats with decent visibility easily exceed £200 each. Putting the money partially aside, there is an unspoken exclusivity to these “high arts”.
I have been slowly chewing through the French thinker Pierre Bourdieu’s tome Distinction, which explores how the logic of the market seeps into our artistic values and cultural pursuits. It’s a sobering challenge to why we like what we like: Bourdieu argues that our tastes can easily adopt a performative element, in our respective quests to be considered sophisticated and, indeed, cultivated. Bourdieu’s term “cultural capital” roughly translates to our sense of relative sophistication and cultural standing in society — whether you have “good” or “bad” taste. How might this apply to opera and ballet’s limited popular appeal? As mentioned before, productions are impractically expensive, which leads to high ticket prices, which means that only the wealthiest among us can regularly enjoy the art. Having money (economic capital) famously doesn’t always equate with good taste (cultural capital). See: American “McMansions”, Richard Mille watches and matte-black SUVs. But what if there was a thing that you could go and see that would develop your taste — something that purports to cultivate and civilise. Something that makes you more sophisticated, and thus opens doors into evermore exclusive social circles? This cynical symbiosis, of the people that work in these mediums needing the cash, and the moneyed consumers needing the cultural cachet, is a Petri dish for snobbery, and exacerbates a very hierarchical approach to culture. Those in the industry must play up the sense of prestige, whether it’s worthy of it or not, while the audiences are more concerned with being seen at the ballet as opposed to actually being at the ballet. They have a vested interest in it not being for everyone. This is not a happy culture, nor is it an especially deep or authentic one. The creatives in all of the industries corralled by this dynamic end up far more creatively constrained than is healthy, doomed to repeat the same major canonic works forever, because new work is too risky and lacks guaranteed “prestige”. This has a stultifying effect on our culture, and eventually degrades our own critical faculties.
I take Chalamet’s swipe as a call to arms. If we actually, genuinely believe in our heart of hearts that this excellent art is civilising and meaningful (is it? That’s another essay…), then the prescription for opera and ballets’ societal relevance is obvious. For every key-stage of a child’s education, they should be stuck on a bus and driven to the nearest opera house to experience an opera and ballet live. A compromise could be a real-time screening at a local cinema, or even live streamed to their school hall. Key-stage 1 gets nutcrackers and magic flutes, and by key-stage 5, they’re grappling with Lulu and sacrificial rites in springtime. This curriculum approach guarantees a comprehensive, shared immersion in the artforms. Just imagine a parallel world with this initiative, where twenty years from now, half of any pubs’ patrons are riffing on their mutual amusement at Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, which they all remember from a school trip that every local school enjoyed. Or perhaps they realise that many attended the same daring ballet premiere in their college/sixth-form years, with scandalous choreography that had their teachers flustered. They are infinitely more likely to get the opera or ballet bug for life. Better still, give everyone nationally a voucher every year or so to redeem and attend a worthy cultural experience for free, be it opera, ballet, the symphony or art exhibition. Of course, there will be eternal debates raging over what is considered “worthy” art or not, but those debates in themselves are extremely worthwhile! I’d rather that than a society that makes no effort to distinguish between art that makes you wiser and worldlier, and unadulterated hedonistic entertainment. There is a line between Bluebeard’s Castle, and Takeshi’s. A good society has decent access to both for all.
“But Keelan… can we afford to do this?” Can we afford not to do this? We are cultivating good lifelong pastimes and passions here, and we know what the absence of such leisure and interests look like. Our voids must be filled somehow. Addictive consumption of gambling, opiates, alcohol, doomscrolling and more like it are on the up here in the UK — following globalised trends. Theatre tickets are not cheap, but they are compared to these pervasive vices (not that opera and opiates are necessarily mutually exclusive…cough Berlioz cough). Perhaps I’m naïve, but I do believe that a life-affirming artistic experience surrounded by your fellow man and woman can be ecstatically rewarding. They make you want to feel more of life, so much so that it staves off the numbing, avoidant urges and anxieties that many addictions fester upon. This is increasingly urgent, considering the much discussed anxious generation that is coming of age. Live opera and ballet experiences are spiritual vaccines — give them to everyone, and you will have an entirely happier, savvier, healthier society!
In sum, it’s too easy to dismiss Chalamet’s snark out of hand. In a time when the real-estate of eyeballs and attention-spans is at a world-historic premium, we cannot afford to just say “Actually I care a lot!” and recline in self-satisfaction. We need to ask the harder questions about who exactly cares and doesn’t care, how and why they care or not, and who doesn’t even know whether they care or not in the first place, having never had the chance to find out. Classical arts might have timeless qualities, but they are still bound to their times.
