However, the key elements of opera are found in many different cultural contexts across the globe, predating the European tradition by centuries (ibid). This suggests that the artform of storytelling through enacted singing, whatever its cultural setting, is a vital form of expression that might also have significant benefit for those engaging with it. In the European lineage, it has been typically associated with a composer and librettist generating a work for others to perform. However, over the past 30 years alternative visions of opera have emerged, particularly in community work, engaging people in the rich multi-art experiences the form can deliver. For example, the Australian community opera Serenading Adela (2018) not only recounted a historical event, but raised social consciousness about conscription in World War 1, and offered a diverse range of participants new opportunities through music, singing, acting and the generation of the visual spectacle (see English & Davidson, 2020). In the Italian work The Silent City (2019), the town, Matera, became the location of the plot with the participants also being from that community and the artists working to build social cohesion through the creative process (see Fabris & Cauzillo, 2024). Both these works exemplify an approach to opera in which the creation processes highlighted inclusivity using co-creation and co-ownership (ibid; see English & Davidson, 2020. Also, for a review of how opera can be devised in community, see Harries, 2020). In our project, we were eager to explore the possibilities of community opera to address responses to the climate crisis.
The power of music
A compelling explanatory model for the positive outcomes that engagements like community opera can generate is ‘The Therapeutic Capacities of Music Model’ (see Brancatisano et al., 2020). It proposes that musical arts possess capacities that make them synchronous, emotional, physical, personal, social and persuasive, enabling those engaged in them to share effects, shaping communal arousal and mood. In turn, these capacities afford a range of cognitive, psychosocial, motor and behavioural benefits, for example, improving social bonding capacities and enhancing skills in memory/thinking tasks (Davidson & Garrido, 2014). It has been suggested that such rich engagements can support the expression, regulation, and adaptation not only of self but community (Brancatisano et al., 2020), and thus have great relevance when grappling with the confronting impacts of extreme weather events.
Besides theoretical propositions, there is strong evidence of music activities in relation to the climate emergency being successfully used to support coping strategies and personal transformation post trauma (Garrido et al., 2015).
The work often uses specialist community artist or music therapist’s skills to move an individual or a group through a psychological process to manage their individual challenges, whether behavioural and/or physical (Davidson et al, 2024). For example, music therapists were among first responders to the Australian fires that occurred on 7 February 2009, Black Saturday, that resulted in more than 200 people in Victoria losing their lives. The therapists led the fire-affect communities in musical tasks, including improvisation and songwriting, carefully navigating discourse on the impact of the fires (McFerran & Teggelove, 2011). In New South Wales, after the Lismore Floods of 2022, where five people died and more than 4000 houses became uninhabitable leading to more than 31,000 people being displaced, local arts workers used creative sessions to support community recovery (Gilmore, 2022). Opportunities to write, recite poems, listen and make music, supported and enabled people to structure and process feelings, offering hope in adversity (Gilmore, 2022; Stephens 2022).
As opera is a multi-artform involving dramatic expression, it is also important to note that applied theatre, drama therapy, and drama in education projects have also been used for community recovery post climate trauma, often focusing on resilience building through imaginative enactments. The work has drawn on a range of theatre-based methods using stories as problem solving frameworks, usually being co-developed with the disaster-affected communities (Heras & Tàbara, 2014; Peek et al., 2016; O’Connor, 2013; Williams, 2010).
Enduring benefits
It is recognised that work is often needed long after the physical disaster has ended to secure impactful and ongoing positive progression. For example, one of the music leaders from the Black Saturday fires, Rita Seethaler, continued working with a singing group and a steel pans band, and was recognised in Arts Victoria’s 2011 Recovery Program report (Fisher & Talvé, 2011). That is, three years after the disaster, benefits of ongoing arts engagements were being reported. Researchers Harms and colleagues (2023) traced 391 individuals affected by the Black Saturday fires for a 10-year period following the event, exploring the relationships between bushfire exposure, personal and community-level variables. Within the framework of post-traumatic growth (PTG), the study revealed PTG was more pronounced for women and was more likely to occur for those who had been in medium- to high-affected areas. While these results might reflect gendered ideas of emotional expression, they demonstrate that the arts in PTG enables new understandings of self and others and enables them to imagine a future, even providing insights into how to live life (see Collier, 2016; Tedeschi, & Moore, 2021). These data also reveal the benefits of ongoing support for people after a traumatic climate event.
Building transformative resilience in relation to the disaster can be a part of an ongoing process that engages artistic/creative approaches (López-Marrero & Tschakert, 2011). One manifestation of this has been establishing annual memorial rituals where survivors and other community members gather to share thoughts and feelings through singing, dancing, speaking, and sharing visual artworks to honour those people, animals, and places that were destroyed (see Davidson et al., 2024). Or, over time, new forms of community practice have been found to emerge, often gradually at a pace fitting community response. Often, the aesthetic/emotional sharing that began at the time of the disaster becomes adapted, reflecting responsiveness to the changing needs of community members, some practices morphing from disaster scenarios to more everyday social foci (ibid; Jacobs et al., 2019).
Allied to the points above, and reported in this issue by Woodland and Hassall, work addressing experiences of climate anxiety has shown that performance and other applied theatre techniques can support a developing sense of critical hope, agency and community, certainly in the youth groups reported (see Woodland and Hassall this issue and Woodland et al., 2023).
A highly successful example of using performance and building capacity to address the existential threats of future climate disasters is found in the project ‘Refuge’ led out of The Arts House Melbourne and described by Thurow, Grehan and Davidson (this issue and fuller detail in Thurow et al., 2023; also see Wyatt et al., 2022; Yue et al., 2016). The project used artist-led processes with a range of first responders and community members, the collaborative tasks including the imagining of future scenarios and experimenting with possible strategies for survival in such circumstances. As Del Favero and colleagues note, preparedness for disaster remains a highly underdeveloped area of climate emergency work. The arts offer excellent potential, as active participation (often shared) can readily stimulate emotional and aesthetic experiences that can in turn support the development of foresight, essential for disaster preparedness (see this issue Del Favero et al., 2024).
Developing a micro-opera focused on creative recovery
Given the known power of opera in its variety of presentational forms, and the evidence of positive creative recovery and the potential applications of arts for creative preparedness in the face of the climate emergency, we decided to engage in an exploratory ‘micro-opera’ project – a short work only 12 minutes in duration, not the more usual 60-180 minutes typically associated with mainstream opera. We now offer a short overview of the work and our reflections on it, not only to explore how community opera can be usefully deployed in climate recovery work, but also to discuss how understandings and insights could serve in building preparedness for future scenarios.
Creswick and its flood. In January 2022, the rural town of Creswick in Central Victoria experienced a huge storm during which 180 homes were severely flooded. While there was no loss of life, more than 55 people were unable to return to their homes for more than 18 months, owing to the severe damage the extreme weather had wreaked (see Creswick floods: Council confirms number of homes affected). The current coauthors (Davidson and Howell) had established community connections with Creswick through CresFest, a community music festival. Jane directs the Master of Music in Opera Performance at the University of Melbourne and in April 2023 she and the students performed at CresFest; and Gillian had participated through different community networks. In discussions with the CresFest Director, the flooding of 2022 and its profound impact on the local residents and the town itself emerged, and it was suggested that community-engaged work might be appropriate and fruitful. Jane was keen to engage the opera students in a project that took them away from traditional opera training to explore the potential of working with a community. Thus, the project evolved to provide the flood-affected residents an opportunity to tell their stories and have their accounts represented in a micro-opera; and to broaden the experiences and skills of the opera students. Gillian and Sarah also work in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at The University of Melbourne, both with strong backgrounds in community-engaged arts including creative leadership and research, and they contributed skills and expertise at every level of the project.
As the project plans began to seed, two key preliminary steps were taken: i) Local community members were informed of the potential project, to take place 18 months after the flood, which was a time when some residents were still displaced and facing associated challenges of living in temporary accommodation. Ethical protocols were secured through an ethics application to the University which sought to minimise any possible trauma impact on the community participants who would inevitably be discussing the challenging lived experience of the flood; ii) the students were engaged in a critical introduction to the project, briefed on the need for ethical procedures and how to approach working in collaborative ways that would prioritise the voices and experiences of the community members.
News archives offered preliminary background research materials for the students, and a face-to-face meeting brought the 13 trainee opera singers into dialogue with seven community members. The meeting enabled the flood-affected participants to share their stories and explain their ongoing situation and feelings, and while difficult stories were shared, a sense of positivity at being able to share experiences emerged.
The meeting offered the students first-hand exposure of the lived experiences of the community members and provided many stimulus materials for the creative work which sought to represent the community’s experiences through the micro-opera, using verbatim transcripts.
Full details of this project are yet to be published, but as facilitators and participants in the conception, development and conclusion of the project, we found the outcomes to be very positive. That a work as short as a micro-opera, devised well after the actual flood event, could be a useful tool to share stories of loss, fear and resilience in adversity was encouraging. Below, we summarise some of our reflections on the project.
An effective mechanism for opening up. At the first meeting, after some verbal ice-breaker activities, the students sang a short piece for the community interviewees. The music was their own creation, developed from their news-based background research. It was their first interpretation of the flood. The musical sharing immediately seemed to reduce barriers between the two groups, with the community members responding emotionally at first, and then asking about which specific elements were being represented and how the work had been achieved. They seemed both inspired and deeply moved by the singing, surprised at how the experience generated strong visceral impacts. The community members not only opened up, but were eager to share their difficult stories. This in turn gave the students access to the emotions of the flood experience, raising their understanding of the power story and music in communicating lived experiences.
Working with skilled performers. The community members were keen to tell their stories and facilitate the students’ work, and were very eager to see the outcome, all interviewees attending most of the performances. None of the informants expressed a desire to participate in the creation or performance of micro-opera, rather they were happy for the students to use their skills to structure the community participants’ words, adding music and actions in ways that the community members acknowledged both intensified and clarified their experience of the flood, and they hoped it would impact audiences as well.
Expressing emotions in a safe way. The community participants were aware that the micro-opera took their memories back to the flood experiences, but in a way that was simultaneously highly evocative, cathartic, and also strangely affirming, offering artistic expression and resolution for them. They were thrilled to hear their own words sung and see their stories enacted. The students were able to realise these key values through their own singing and acting skills, and so also felt affirmed in their own capacities, and were able to realise a deeper understanding of the relevance and importance of community-engaged creative work.
Performance and its potential. The work was performed four times. Firstly, in a lunchtime concert in a town about 10 kilometres away from the flood site where most community informants came and were interviewed by the researchers to capture their responses to the finished micro-opera. Second and third performances were to the public in Melbourne on two consecutive days. The final performance was in Creswick, for community and the town councillors in the flood zone. Each performance was deeply affecting for the students and audiences, all of them visibly moved. Indeed, in the fourth and final performance, many of the students and audience members wept during the performance, but quickly transformed their tears into cheers at the end. Being within the flood site, though two years after the actual flooding, the strong emotions of memorial added much to the performance.
In post-performance discussions, audience members, including councillors, acknowledged the critical importance of the memorialisation.
Future hope. In addition to reflection,when asked about engaging in future work, all parties felt that group encounter (group dialogue and creative work) could be useful for shaping thoughts and feelings, and perhaps even avenues for climate preparedness. There was a general feeling of hope, even elation at what had been shared in the micro-opera.
Concluding thought
The Creswick micro-opera project is a preliminary effort to explore the power of opera as a tool for climate emergency understanding and imaginings of how to prepare for such future events. We look forward to progressing this work and disseminating our findings as widely as we can. As the climate emergency grows, we need innovative and effective approaches to mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Arts-based engagements affect participants in all-encompassing and transformative ways. Care and investment is required in developing appropriate arts-based approaches and assets to help communities grapple with a future of thus far unimagined extreme weather events and their wide-ranging impacts.
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Jane W. Davidson is a Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities, undertaking research in performance, musical development, intercultural engagement and music for wellbeing outcomes. She was Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2011–18), and is currently Head of Performing Arts and University of Melbourne’s Creativity and Wellbeing Initiative’s Chair. Jane is also an internationally award-winning opera singer and director.
Sarah Woodland is a researcher, practitioner and educator in applied theatre, participatory arts and socially engaged performance. She has recently completed a three-year Dean’s Fellowship in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne, investigating how the performing arts can promote social justice and wellbeing in institutions and communities (2020-2023). Sarah is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts and has published widely in theatre and interdisciplinary arts.
Gillian Howell is an award-winning interdisciplinary researcher and creative practitioner whose work aims to advance our understanding of the contributions of music-making and voice to community wellbeing and social justice, with a particular interest in peacebuilding, conciliation, and dialogue. As Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, she is leading a portfolio of research investigating: the role(s) of music in community dialogue processes; the varieties of peace that music-making fosters; collaborative songwriting as a methodology for understanding voice and power among war-affected adolescents; and the practices of musician-peace-builders around the world.
Main Image Credit: Micro-opera at University of Melbourne, 2023