Opera is an art form made of other art forms: music, theater, dance, visual art, film. It brings together performers, creative teams and audiences from around the world for what, at its finest, is a glorious but ephemeral experience.
Imagine, then, the carbon footprint for this grandest of performing arts.
It’s not just about the globalized nature of opera today. If companies want to go green, they have to think beyond plane tickets to how productions are made, what materials are used in costumes and sets, and how the theater operates. They have to think about what food they serve, what dishes they use, and whether water comes from glass or plastic bottles. They even have to think about how audience members, often thousands at a time, travel to and from performances.
In an age of tighter budgets and rising expenses, it can be difficult for houses to know where to start. But the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam is setting an example with the great leaps it has made in recent years toward sustainability. The dream, distant for now, is carbon neutrality; the reality may still be a work in progress, yet changes have been adopted with remarkable speed.
Under the banner of its Green Deal program, the opera house has brought sustainability to virtually every corner of its operation. This year, it even updated its contracts for creative teams to include a commitment that their productions use at least 50 percent recycled material.
“If an artist says, ‘Sorry, but I’m not interested in your Green Deal,’ that’s fine,” said Sophie de Lint, who has been the director of the Dutch National Opera since 2018. “We shake hands and move on. But that hasn’t happened. People are actually really open and want to go there.”
The Dutch National Opera, to be clear, has the advantage of its Green Deal efforts being backed by generous state funding, as well as the luxury of operating in the Netherlands, a country where sustainability is woven into daily life. It would be a much more difficult undertaking in the United States, where climate change is comparatively politicized and financially starved opera companies barely have the structural wiggle room to get rid of their plastic Champagne flutes.
De Lint, who was the artistic director of the Zurich Opera House in Switzerland before moving to Amsterdam, said that the city’s culture is “why I came to work here.”
“It’s a country where you don’t think about what was better before,” she added. “It’s about what could be better tomorrow.”
Kenza Koutchoukali, a 36-year-old Dutch director who is staging the premiere of “Oum” at the company’s Opera Forward Festival this year, said that the urgency of fighting climate change is “something that everyone my age is aware of.”
The Dutch National Opera took an early step toward sustainability in 2019, when it received local certificates for the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method, better known as BREEAM. Similar to LEED certification in the United States, it requires things like installing solar panels, finding green methods of waste disposal and implementing programs to promote biodiversity. The opera house, for example, built boxes for bird nests, and gardens to attract and nurture local insects.
But that was just the start. The pandemic, de Lint said, helped opera companies see that entrenched habits could change quickly. In 2021, she hired a sustainability coordinator, Julie Fuchs (who, in a running joke and slight source of confusion, shares her name with the soprano Julie Fuchs). De Lint likes to refer to her as a coach because, rather than dictate changes, “she so brilliantly coaches all of us.”
Fuchs got to work developing a way to calculate the carbon footprint of everything that goes into a performance at the opera house. In 2022, she discovered that the biggest sources of emissions were audience members and refreshments at the theater’s bars.
It’s difficult to move the needle on audience habits outside the theater: whether they commute by car, train, bike or even plane. But the Dutch National Opera was able to quickly change how it operated internally. The company, Fuchs said, bases its policies on the Paris Agreement, the international climate treaty that was signed in 2016 and aims to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030.
Much of Fuchs’s job has involved collecting data, which guides many of her targets for the opera house. For example, she found a way to determine whether going paperless in the office would be just as harmful as printing everything because of its reliance on cloud storage. (It’s not.) Through calculations like that, the company has arrived at changes throughout the building.
It began offering only vegetarian options for food. Even bitterballen, the traditional Dutch snack of stew croquettes, are now made with mushrooms instead of beef. At one banquet with high-level donors, diners were deep into their meal before they realized, and asked why, there were no fish or meat dishes. “They ended up eating all the bread,” de Lint said. “It was a reminder that you really need to communicate, but it also takes some time to change habits.”
The theater’s bar doesn’t use any disposable dishes, and there isn’t a plastic bottle in sight. Inside and out, the building is outfitted with LED lights. And for staff, air travel has been drastically reduced. “Now I have no points,” Bob Brandsen, the house’s technical director, said playfully.
Directors also travel less than they used to. Ideally, they do what they can by video call, then come to Amsterdam for a long stretch before opening night. It’s more complicated for singers, some of whom are used to leaving town on days off, often to visit family. That could limit the artists wanting to appear at the house; some are known to balance their work with caregiving or needing to be close to their children.
“Amsterdam is a hyper-international, multicultural city, and I want us to remain an international opera house,” de Lint said. “But we have to try to do this in the most responsible way, and again, you must have this conversation with artists, as early as possible.”
It is also crucial to discuss sustainability efforts with creative teams early, even before they sign their contracts to take on a production. To help them reuse materials, Fuchs has worked to create a database of props, costumes and more that the Dutch National Opera keeps in storage.
The Green Deal also provides artists with a pyramid-shaped diagram of building materials. At the top is the worst sustainability offender: aluminum. (One suggested replacement is steel, which is less harmfully extracted and can also be recycled.) Near the bottom is wood, a renewable resource, and even better is something generic from another production that can simply be used again.
De Lint said the Green Deal has also affected how a season is planned, with a move toward what she called “short-term programming.” If a project doesn’t seem to be working out, if artistic vision and sustainability goals appear irreconcilable, “we can be a bit radical and say ‘No, we are not doing this anymore.’”
“It’s tough,” she said, “but it’s important.”
There is no exact template for how the house’s policies work. Approaches are as varied as the repertoire, from a new chamber opera to Puccini’s enormous “Il Trittico,” directed by Barrie Kosky last season. At any rate, the company learns more with each production. “Basically,” Brandsen said, “we’re making prototypes every time.”
A notable case was Ellen Reid’s “The Shell Trial,” which premiered at the Opera Forward Festival last year. As a work about climate change, it also aspired to be as close to carbon-neutral as possible. But it hit a snag when the creative team decided it wanted fire and ice in the production.
Fuchs said a simple solution would have been to say no. Instead, she began to research the carbon footprint of using gas to light a fire onstage. The company could purchase “green” gas, but it would have to be shipped from Belgium. Then she found that it would not be much of a problem to use the local gas, but to minimize emissions the amount would have to be reduced. The artists agreed to cut it by 50 percent, which satisfied them as well as Fuchs’s goals.
“We try to do this for every project,” de Lint said. “I’m not saying it always succeeds, but we are really trying.”
For the Opera Forward Festival this year, the house challenged itself to present three productions, all premieres, on its main stage using sustainable methods. It began on March 14 with “We Are the Lucky Ones,” for eight singers and a large orchestra, and continued the next week with “Oum” and “Codes,” an immense work conceived by the director Gregory Caers.
There were signs of the Green Deal throughout. Both “We Are the Lucky Ones” and “Oum” were performed on a shallow stage, and designed with the kind of portability that could allow them to be assembled and struck quickly, but also to travel widely, whether to an opera house or a concert hall. Koutchoukali said that because of the guidelines, she knew to avoid materials like silk in the costumes and scenic design for “Oum.”
That opera’s score, by Bushra El-Turk, wasn’t printed until it was in its most final form. But, she said, it wasn’t a problem. “That’s the goal, right?” she added. “With a leading opera house like this, you let it become part of the work, and eventually it becomes the culture.”
Caers was hoping for a similar cultural shift with “Codes,” which is performed by a cast of about 170 singing and dancing students projecting sheer energy from a bare stage. “Of course, we have an ecologic way of building a performance, but there’s more,” he said. “When we gather and talk about this, we create a dialogue with these youngsters that, maybe, they take to their kitchen tables at home. And slowly these waves begin to change the world a little bit.”
For all the optimism at the Dutch National Opera, people there acknowledge that a lot of work remains, along with an open question about how other houses can adopt their own version of the Green Deal. Fuchs went straight from an interview in Amsterdam to Barcelona, Spain (by train of course), to share her findings at the latest Opera Europa conference. And through co-productions, the company’s peers will naturally take on its practices.
“This work is easier with others next to you,” Fuchs said. “We all know that it’s going to take years, that we’re at the bottom of a mountain that we need to climb. But we just need to start.”
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