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Paper short abstract

This paper experiments with resituating western classical opera, a polarising artform, in Global South contexts, in this case Sri Lanka, arguing that this ‘estrangement effect’ both reveals and responds to young people’s experiences of social and emotional distress in creative and disruptive ways.

Paper long abstract

What can using opera as an ethnographic method reveal about young people’s experiences of social inequality and emotional distress? This paper presents findings from ‘Open to Opera’, a three-pronged study aimed at expanding opera education, improving access in performance, and exploring operatic storytelling as an intervention for building emotional resilience among young people in Colombo, Sri Lanka. This study was developed in response to disparities in youth mental health outcomes, particularly suicide rates that are twice those of high-income countries (Knipe et al., 2017). Sri Lanka represents a post-colonial and post-war landscape characterised by class and ethnic divides, and is presently reeling from its worst economic crisis post-independence. The study was conducted through collaborative workshops with aspiring music undergraduates who are excluded from elite classical music-making spaces in Colombo largely to due class and linguistic barriers. ‘Open to Opera’ used operatic storytelling to explore everyday struggles including family conflict, bullying and loneliness, culminating in a public showcase which included student-led compositions drawing on their lived experiences of distress. While western classical opera is a polarising artform which typically excludes marginalised populations, this paper argues that resituating the artform in the Global South resists opera’s racist and elitist legacies while making it possible for young people to articulate their distress in new ways by stepping into a different cultural space. Through a form of ‘estrangement effect’ (Brecht, 1977), their lived experience is rendered audible in ways that are at once creative, hopeful, safe, and productively disruptive.