Professional cultural institutions and the community? Lessons from the first community production of the Barcelona opera house

Abstract

Large cultural institutions have been given goals that go well beyond their conventional artistic endeavours. Opera houses are no exception. One strategy they attempt is to stage community productions, but how does this activity match with institutions that seek “artistic excellence”? We focus on a case study of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, and firstly see to what extent productions staged by large cultural institutions can be considered community-based programmes. Secondly, we analyse if these programmes are realistic in terms of reaching their target population. Lastly, we study the degree of participation achieved. In order to do so, we review the concepts of access and participation to build our own analytical framework. We also follow a qualitative and quantitative methodology, performing interviews and fielding a questionnaire to participants. We think that our research and results are relevant from both an analytical point of view and an empirical perspective: in terms of access, the Liceu worked towards correcting the underrepresentation of minority groups in artistic forms that obtain public funding, but these efforts were limited; regarding participation, the opera was developed for, with and by the community depending on the action analysed, and it combined crowd-sourcing, co-creation and audience-as-artist actions.