After Timothée Chalamet said that “no one cares” about opera and ballet, you could forgive the industry for dismissing the young Oscar hopeful out of hand.
Instead, the heads of the Royal Ballet and Opera, the English National Ballet, Sadler’s Wells and Scottish Opera have all invited Chalamet to come to a show.
Alex Reedijk, who has been general director of Scottish Opera since 2006, said that Chalamet was just a “teeny bit wrong”. “I don’t wish to make it a personal thing,” he said. “It’s simply that his remarks don’t reflect the world that I see on a daily basis. We’ve just done four sold-out performances of a world premiere here in Scotland.”
He added: “I would say, listen, Timothée, you need to come and see the work. Be an audience member, and just see how many people love, enjoy, admire and are moved by the work that we put on stage every working night of the year.”
Sir Alistair Spalding at Sadler’s Wells
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Sir Alistair Spalding, the artistic director of Sadler’s Wells, said that he would love to get Chalamet along and invited him to a production next week “if he’s in town”.
“Ballet has kept up with the 21st century, but it still has this kind of sense of being an elitist form that doesn’t keep up with the times and is sort of ‘fuddy duddy’,” Spalding added.
Sadler’s Wells said it had doubled its audience in the last ten years and recently opened a new venue near the Olympic Park in east London, which offers a hip-hop course for teenagers. Spalding said: “We want people to get what we’re doing. We really want to debunk these images and to really say this is for everyone: anyone can come and enjoy what we’re doing.
“I loved Marty Supreme. It was so exciting and thrilling and had me on the edge of my seat — and that’s how people feel when they come to Sadler’s Wells.”
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Aaron Watkin, the artistic director of the English National Ballet, said that “there are many people who care deeply about opera and dance”, adding: “Timothée would be very welcome at one of our performances to experience the profound emotional impact of ballet for himself.”
In response to Chalamet’s comments, the Royal Ballet and Opera posted a video of their performances and the rapturous applause from audiences with the caption: “We care.” They said: “Every night at the Royal Opera House, thousands of people gather for ballet and opera: for the music; for the storytelling; for the sheer magic of live performance. If you’d like to reconsider, our doors are open.”
Chalamet, 30, had suggested ballet and opera were dying art forms in a stage conversation with the actor Matthew McConaughey.
“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive’,” he told his Interstellar co-star.
Scottish Ballet’s production of Mary, Queen of Scots at Sadler’s Wells
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As the audience at the University of Texas laughed, he added: “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”
Chalamet’s comments might surprise his mother, Nicole Flender, a trained ballet dancer who studied at the famous LaGuardia school in New York. His grandmother was a Broadway dancer, and his sister initially trained as a dancer at the School of American Ballet.
Despite the protestations of opera chiefs, one of the most influential figures in the industry said last week that opera was struggling to react to tell contemporary stories.
John Berry, who was artistic director of the English National Opera for a decade, said that opera was “missing out on the party” by failing to attract top-notch authors to write stories for modern audiences.
He said: “If opera wants to own the zeitgeist in the performing arts, then it needs to commission stories that have a bigger impact.”
Reedijk agreed that it was “incumbent upon us to tell 21st-century stories” said it was “equally possible to connect with audiences through older operas, because fundamentally at the heart of any great opera is something about the human condition”.
