14 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Friday 20 November 2020

arts

East London’s Arcola theatre square and nine metres high at its high-
est point, using the shipping containers
is constructing a new outdoor as ballast and with a roof that floats
space for Covid and beyond. without use of a central post. Planters
around the space will provide scent and
Sarah Hemming reports colour — and garnishes for cocktails sold
at the bar — and the light and acoustics
will be softened by hanging drapes simi-

I
f launching a new show in these
uncertain times is risky, launching a
new theatre seems optimistic at the
least. But that is what the Arcola
theatre in east London is doing.
“I would say it’s the opposite of crazy,”
protests Arcola executive director Ben
Todd, affably, when I put this to him.
“It’s probably the most sensible thing
we’ve ever done.”
Step a little closer and you see what he
means. Arcola Outside will be a new
venue constructed on a derelict site
opposite the existing theatre building. A
large, covered open-air structure, it will
hold around 80 people (socially dis-
tanced), be fully equipped with stage,
bar and backstage and be ready to face
anything the English winter has to
throw at it. The current plan is to run
trial performances next month with a
view to opening fully in January (though
everything is contingent on lockdowns).
If successful, it could provide a model
for other organisations — not just thea-
tres — to follow.
The idea, explains Todd, was born not
of wild optimism, but of necessity.
“We’ve had a much more pessimistic
approach to Covid-19 than most people
for quite a long time. It was fairly obvi-
ous, even nine months ago, that we were
going to be operating in a way that was
Covid-secure for quite a while to come —
and indoors wasn’t the way to do it.”
There was an imperative, he adds, to
use government financial support
wisely, to create employment for artists
and entertainment for audiences. But
whereas for some theatres that might
mean moving online or opening safely
indoors, those options didn’t work for
the Arcola.
“What is the way to address this new
reality with integrity?” he asks. “There
are other organisations that are able to
migrate really well into digital format.
But that’s not us. We do straightforward,
good plays in a tiny room sitting on top
of each other. So outside was a sensible
thing to do.”
The thinking is typical of a theatre
that has, since its launch 20 years
ago, punched well above its weight.
Started by irrepressible artistic director
Theatre’s fresh-air future vision
Above: design Mehmet Ergen and executive producer
for the new Leyla Nazli in a former garment factory
Arcola Outdoors down a side street in Hackney, the
space. Below: Arcola has staged new plays, classics,
entrance to the European drama, fielded impressive
existing theatre casts and launched young writers. Actor
in Hackney Greg Hicks played Richard III at the
Bausor Studio; Lidia Crisafulli
Arcola; Barney Norris’s immensely
moving Visitors had its first outing there.
Nine years ago, the company moved
to larger premises — a former paint
factory in Ashwin Street. And just as
Frank McGuinness’s Factory Girls was
an early show at the original venue in
honour of the building’s former role,
the new theatre opened with Rebecca
Lenkiewicz’s The Painter: a drama about
artist JMW Turner (played by Toby
Jones), one of the paint factory’s most
famous customers.
The Arcola has also been at the fore-
front of seeking environmental sustain-
ability in theatres, largely because of
the presence of Todd, who runs its
sister company Arcola Energy and
describes himself as “an academic mar-
ried into Arcola”.
“I’m an engineer — I did a PhD on
clean power stations,” he says. “I was
going to have a sabbatical in the theatre
for a year. That was nearly 20 years ago
— I never managed to escape!”
But the intimacy of the theatre makes
it a poor fit for a pandemic that thrives
in packed indoor spaces. So the team
looked at the stretch of land opposite,
which housed a few old shipping con-
tainers and portable buildings. In keep-
ing with the sustainability ethos of the
theatre, those containers now find
themselves pressed into service for the
new venture. And what began life as
possibly “a few pub tables and umbrel-
las” has progressed into something
more substantial — and weatherproof.
“It was clear from the outset that any
temporary structure we put up would
likely blow away or get very, very wet,”
says Jon Bausor, who has designed the
new space. “So we’re creating something
that has more solidity — and hopefully
more of a grace and a beauty. We hope it
is a venue that can live on: so it can work
as a space during Covid but then evolve
to become something else.”
Bausor, an international stage
designer, has designed dozens of shows
for the indoor Arcola, and has also built
many striking outdoor sets, including a
vast suspended mirror that hovered
over The Seagull at Regent’s Park’s Open
Air Theatre. He designed the Paralym-
pics opening ceremony in London 2012.
For Arcola Outside, he says, “I’ve tried
to work out what [the venue] is, what it
stands for. I was looking at a lot of Mon-
golian yurts — these moveable palaces
from the Middle Ages for a nomadic life-
style — and thinking about what that
could be in a modern context. So it takes
its principles from that: it has outer col-
umns and a structure which requires no
central pillars.”
Collaborating with engineer Philip
Cooper, who worked with him on the
suspended mirror for The Seagull, he has
come up with a structure 17 metres
lar to those in an outdoor souk.
“It was important to make something
that was a surprise off Ashwin Street,”
says Bausor. “It’s quite hectic around
there. I was trying to imagine a secret
space that you could discover, so you
could step off the street into a kind of
haven: a calm space that feels com-
pletely separated from the outside
world.” The colours, he says will be
warm — rusts, ochres, browns — partly
“so it will give you the feeling of warmth
even if you’re not warm!”
The venue will not be heated: there is
no way to do so without wasting vast
amounts of energy. So will people come?
‘It’s the safest space
you can get and you just
need to put a few more
clothes on. I’d go!’
“It’s a different experience, a differ-
ent aesthetic and maybe that’s the point
— actually embracing that,” says Todd,
adding that shows will be short, there
will be hot mulled wine and blankets to
buy. “It’s the safest space you can get
and you just need to put a few more
clothes on. I’d go!”
The team hopes that Arcola Outside
will outlive its initial purpose. But its
wider legacy could be in helping to
address a much deeper shift in priorities
across society, prompted by the pan-
demic and the threat of climate change.
“Even once Covid has receded, I think
we might see a positive change in atti-
tude,” says Todd. “A willingness to be
outside, to dress to suit the weather —
because environmentally we need it
anyway. And the pandemic threat is
going to have to live on everybody’s risk
register now for a while. There is a
strong argument to say we mustn’t treat
this as a temporary blip and then go
back to business as usual. This is going
to happen again. Let’s be ready and try
to manage it a bit better next time. Let’s
try to learn something.”
arcolatheatre.com

Covid-proof opera faces eco-concerns

Masks on,
An international team in the Hong
Hong Kong have produced a Kong
Children’s
fully flexible, pandemic-ready Choir
piece, writes Andrew Jack performs
in ‘Aria’
Pattor Chan

W
hen the composer
Eugene Birman moved
from the UK to Hong
Kong two years ago, he
was shocked to discover
a city suffering from persistent pollu-
tion and smog, rather than the clean
modern urban environment he had
imagined.
That inspired Aria, which — despite
artistic constraints, local political
upheavals and the global disruption of
coronavirus — opened last week in Hong
Kong as one of the world’s first pandem-
ic-proof operas. It combines music,
installation art and big data to reflect on
environmental concerns.
“I wanted to do a project about the
environment that didn’t itself contrib-
ute negatively to the environment,” says
Birman. “A lot of others that do are hor-
rendously wasteful.”
Birman teamed up with Kingsley Ng,
a Hong Kong-Canadian artist who had
worked on bold projects including After
the Deluge, an installation in the city’s
giant underground storm water storage
tank, and Twenty Five Minutes Older, a
conceptual artwork inside a tram which
was taken to Art Basel.
The new work, Aria, is an 80-minute
combined opera and installation whose
audience — limited to 20 people for each
performance — do not sit in an audito-
rium but walk through different settings
in the city’s Forsgate Conservatory.
Working around the constraints of the
Conservatory meant using no tradi-
tional stage or scenery. That it itself was
also a decision linked the theme of sus-
tainability.
“We wanted to experiment with
interactive formats,” says Birman. “You
normally sit, and are a spectator: you
see a set on a stage and are forbidden
from entering it. It’s almost a taboo in
opera or music to let the audience in on
the creation.”
Instead, the creators divided the
roofed Forsgate Conservatory into seg-
ments through which audiences prome-
nade, allowing them to linger, listen and
observe. Ng likens it to a sushi conveyor
belt.
The audience members are ushered
by dancers with lanterns through a pri-
meval forest ecosystem to a post-
climate-collapse desert and then to a
contemporary podium, accompanied
by projections of social media reactions
to pollution as well as live singing from
the Hong Kong Children’s Choir and
holograms of Denmark’s Theatre of
Voices ensemble.
Aria is a reference to both music and
air. The artists worked with computer
scientists to analyse comments made on
social media about air pollution in Hong
Kong and the Chinese mainland to
inform the libretto and to project during
the performance. They developed an
algorithm that distorts the soundtrack
to reflect the local air pollution data.
They also worked with the Hong Kong
Children’s Choir, asking the children to
‘We didn’t want negativity
— it’s better to highlight,
dramatise, let people make
their own decisions’
contribute their own views of pollution.
“In opera, children are being used
increasingly because a child on the stage
means showing someone with inno-
cence and a future, but they have little
input into how the future is being cre-
ated,” says Birman. “We didn’t want to
force them to speak others’ words.”
Coronavirus delayed the launch by
several months and restricted the audi-
ence size. The singers have to use masks,
reinforcing the theme of breathlessness.
Travel restrictions meant that instead of
flying in the Theatre of Voices from Den-
mark, they were recorded and the
image projected with hologram technol-
ogy on to a jet of water.
From the start the two artists, work-
ing with Prof Johnny Poon at Hong Kong
Baptist University and colleagues from
the computer science department in a
wider project called Space to Breathe,
drew on the two key ideas: inter­activity
and sustainability.
This is not the first time the composer
has addressed sensitive themes in unu-
sual settings in his work: there has been
climate change, inequality and finance
in State of the Union and the financial cri-
sis in Nostra Cosa; No. 289, written for “50
voices and one megaphone”, was about
and performed on the disputed border
between Estonia and Russia.
But he argues that any underlying
political message should be subtle. “We
didn’t want negativity — it’s better to
highlight, dramatise, let people make
their own decisions,” he says. “That’s
more effective than blame: go home and
think about it.”
While the Hong Kong government
covered the estimated £220,000 costs
and made tickets available free of
charge, Aria has something in common
with much opera in its exclusivity. The
limited places were snapped up within
minutes of release, as residents sought
new cultural experiences after months
of demonstrations and controls on pub-
lic events driven by the virus.
But Birman argues that a compensat-
ing advantage of the final version is that
much of the performance is now “pre-
packed”, with the holograms pre-
recorded and touring versions likely to
cost less than £100,000. The logisti-
cal challenges and carbon emissions of
flying in the Theatre of Voices and props
have been eliminated.
Organisers need simply to
recruit local children’s choirs and feed
in the new location’s air pollution data to
modify the projections and music.
Several festivals around the world
including Manchester International
Festival are already in discussions to
present their own versions of Aria, and a
virtual reality version will be released
later this year. The result will be a recy-
clable opera for the new era.
newvision.gov.hk/2020/en/aria