Changing tune: Opera Australia opts for ‘collaborative’ leadership
The nation’s biggest performing arts company will not replace its artistic director role, just three weeks after the abrupt departure of Jo Davies.
Amid unprecedented turmoil at the nation’s flagship arts companies, Opera Australia is considering switching to a more “collaborative” leadership model, dispensing with the solo artistic director role that has shaped the company for decades.
“Opera Australia is bigger than any one person … it is a collective,’’ said the company’s chief executive Fiona Allan, as she launched OA’s 2025 season.
Ms Allan’s comments came less than three weeks after the abrupt departure of OA artistic director Jo Davies on August 30, after she had spent just nine months full time in the coveted role.
Welsh-born Davies moved from the UK to Australia to take up her role, and her resignation sent shockwaves through the industry. But Ms Allan revealed that OA – Australia’s biggest performing arts company – was in no hurry to find a replacement artistic director. “(We) haven’t started that,’’ she said, when asked if the search for a new artistic director was under way. “We are sitting back and thinking about what does arts leadership need to be for a company of this sort of size.’’
In recent months, artistic or executive directors from Queensland Ballet, the Adelaide Festival, Queensland Theatre Company and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra have all left their positions prematurely.
Alluding indirectly to that turmoil, Ms Allan said: “We’re not going straight back out to market to find another artistic director. We’re going to stop for a couple of months, work with the board and look at all sorts of different ways you could look at that … having a music director and an artistic director, for example.’’
Asked if OA was considering making Ms Allan artistic director as well as CEO, she replied: “We’re not looking at that at all … I’m interested in how do we use a broad artistic leadership to contribute to decisions, because … it’s a collaborative process.’’
OA music director Tahu Matheson – who curated the 2025 season with Davies – agreed, saying: “We need people looking at things from a different point of view. We need checks and balances on both sides.’’ He was referring to checks and balances on everything from licence fees paid for foreign shows to how many new productions OA could afford.
The company recorded a $4.9m operating loss in 2023 and Ms Allan admitted: “We are under a lot of financial pressure.’’
The company’s Sydney summer season will kick off in January 2025 with a co-production, with Sydney Festival, of Cinderella (Cendrillon) by French director Laurent Pelly. This marks the first time the company has performed Massenet’s opera and Pelly’s acclaimed production has already had seasons at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House.
OA’s new season, announced on Tuesday, is notable for its pivot to Australian artists: at least 83 per cent of opera principals cast across the company’s Sydney and Melbourne seasons are Australian, including much-loved stars Nicole Car, Emily Edmonds, and Emma Matthews. It has been a decade since Matthews performed for OA, Allan said.
In the past, OA has been criticised for awarding too many singing, conducting and directing roles to foreign artists. Ms Allan said the new season builds on “a conscious decision”, taken at the start of 2024, to “redress that imbalance’’.
She said “the company was founded to make sure that people in this country could have jobs in this country – we’ve switched the default setting to be majority Australian”.
In 2025, Melbourne Theatre Company artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks will direct a new production of Bizet’s Carmen, with soprano Danielle de Niese playing the title role.
In a bid to attract new audiences and boost the bottom line, the company will stage three musicals in 2025 – Broadway hit Hadestown, a new Guys & Dolls production bound for Sydney Harbour, and Rent.
The new season also includes a Dido & Aeneas collaboration with Opera Queensland and the Circa circus company.
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