This your opera company. This is your opera company on diversity, inclusion and equity. Any questions?
When Afton Battle resigned last week as head of Fort Worth Opera, the news caused a stir among opera leaders, musicians and patrons in North Texas and beyond.
Battle was one of the first Black women ever to lead a U.S. opera company. Her pledge, she said shortly after accepting the position in 2020, was to bolster Fort Worth Opera’s commitment to inclusivity and diversity.
“Y’all know the challenges of being black in this world,” she wrote in a June 30 post on Facebook. “Magnify that with being a woman running an arts organization in a conservative city and state.
As usual, it’s all about the woke activist and she’s the victim.
Particularly worrying to some former board members The Dallas Morning News spoke with in the months before Battle’s resignation was her decision to add a page on the company’s website supporting the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
“We hired her to be general director, not the voice of activism,” said Whit Smith, a former board member who was on the search committee that hired Battle.
The opera is “an arts organization, not a political organization,” Lindsay added. And it’s “trying to reach everyone, not just one group.”
This is why it’s crucial for people who serve on boards, school, performing arts, the local park or anything, to be aware and watchful, to listen for code words and to understand that, especially these days, a push for diversity doesn’t just mean bringing in minorities, but introducing racist agendas while destroying whatever good the organization does.
“I wish Afton the very best, and I wish the arts in Fort Worth and beyond start ridding their boards of people who don’t understand the intersection of art and politics/activism/social issues,” Kenney Elkomus, a board member at Arts Administrators of Color Network, said.
“Start ridding their boards of people who don’t understand the intersection of art and politics/activism/social issues.”
It’s amazing when they start actually saying the quiet part out loud. That’s the goal and it’s happened all over. They make their way into the organization, remake the staff, then the boards and then use the newly hijacked group as a unit in their larger campaign while going after bigger game.
The Fort Worth Opera seems to have dodged that bullet.
Beyond the BLM stuff, Battle had essentially jettisoned opera at the Fort Worth Opera.
Battle’s biggest change to the company was doing away with much of its traditional programming in favor of cheaper options. She eliminated the spring festival format, instead offering mainly small-scale concerts around the area featuring both Black and Latin American singers and composers. It was a necessity, she said, for reasons besides dollars and cents.
“I don’t think a season should pass, ever,” Battle previously told KERA News, “that we don’t intentionally program a work or works by composers and artists and creatives who represent the global majority.”
Opera isn’t about representing some imaginary global demographic which classes all non-white people together as being a member of some anti-white construct, but about an art form.
Before she arrived, the company had made a start at engaging with diverse groups. In 2017, it launched Noches de Ópera (Nights of Opera), focusing on Spanish-language operas and Latino culture. Battle expanded those efforts, featuring Black and Latin American singers and composers much more extensively than ever before at the company.
Over Battle’s tenure, the company has staged only one full-scale opera, La traviata, albeit in a trimmed version. The current season doesn’t include a single staged production — only a concert version of Verdi’s Aida, with a mostly black cast.
It’s easy to see why Battle was a disaster. And why the Fort Worth Opera now has a chance to rebuild and rise from the racialist rubble she left behind.
Opera is not about race. It’s about art. But the Left always demands that art serve its agenda or it’s useless and must be replaced with political agitprop.
Ars gratia artist is more than a bunch of Latin words you see briefly around the MGM lion. It’s an idea that the Left violently hates. Because it doesn’t believe in art for art’s sake, only art for the Left’s sake.
For years, we’d enjoy going to the Blackfriars Playhouse / American Shakespeare Center for several productions a year. We stopped a few years ago when they became “woke”, and we no longer felt comfortable attending their productions. I told them to stop sending me newsletters to save money.
“But the Left always demands that art serve its agenda or it’s useless and must be replaced with political agitprop.”
And that is why, from the Soviet Union times to the present, Leftist “art” always sucks.
Art is about truth, beauty and goodness. Where is the good, the truth or the beauty of destroying opera? Nowhere. The animating principles are envy and hatred.
Protested the Repulsive Klingh0ffer opera at The Met some years back. Many people showed up. including local luminaries. Very sad and uncomfortable for us opera lovers.
Antisemitic garbage is a more straightforward way of saying it…
That revolting piece is the reason I will never return to the Met. I have wonderful memories of seeing some really grand works staged there, Boris Godunov, Parsifal, and some of the old standbys like Aida. They may still be artistically a great company but if they are going to perform anti=Semitic garbage I’m not spending a fortune to see it.
Thanks for the tip. Can’t wait to see it.
Festeggio il suo licenziamento….. Eh she is a colored snake….
Politics/activism/social issues make for bad art.
Leave it to the left to exclude opera from an opera company, in the name of “inclusion.”.
“…“Y’all know the challenges of being black in this world,” she wrote in a June 30 post on Facebook. “Magnify that with being a woman running an arts organization in a conservative city and state…” yea we know, all those klanners showing up burning crosses, leaving nooses everywhere, and those rowdy opera fans always screaming obscenities and racial slurs. It’s a miracle Battle survived, especially being just a woman, in the he-man woman hating misogynistic white supremacist opera set. No doubt the worst scars are on the inside.
The opera is “an arts organization, not a political organization,. And it’s “trying to reach everyone, not just one group.” – Everyone? Actual inclusion.
Conservatives are told, when we do not like the direction something is going (like Twitter or a TV Network), if you don’t like it start your own. However, the shoe is never on the other foot. Instead, the wokesters sneak there way into a neutral organization or possibly more conservative organization (like Boy Scouts) and then corrupt it from the inside.
Im actually surprised this ”woman” didnt call Opera a white supremacist medium as it comes from Europe, Italy to be exact.
She is the leader of an Opera in Texas but screams about racism..Does she actually listen to herself?.
If a white kid does some Break Dancing or Rap noise crap wearing dreadlocks he is told, and put down, for using other peoples culture but the black folks are never charged with the same nonsense..
I have great respect for Denzel Washington however as a Scotsman I did not like the fact they he played the part of King Lear, the Scottish King of centuries ago.
Im sure the blacks in the USA would get rather angry if Brad Pitt played the part of an African King.
The left marches through all the organizations, because it is easier and cheaper to take over what exists than to create. Marx said everything must be destroyed. Taking over and destroying an organization has the goal of destroying institutions and replacing society with a new stage of history.
Notice that she repeats standard radical leftist narratives, that don’t require any independent thought of her own.
“That which goes woke goes broke.”
Good for them to get rid of a wokester!!!