Dubai Opera offers glimpse of inaugural season programme in August

Destined to be the performing arts hub of the Middle East, Dubai Opera is the city’s first purpose--‐built multi--‐format performing arts theatre situated in the heart of Downtown Dubai. It is set to be the centre stage of all arts and home to all genres from ballet classical to musicals and theatre, comedy, family, rock, pop and jazz and will host its first performance this autumn with a concert by legendary Spanish tenor, conductor and art administrator Plácido Domingo. The Aviamost team met Chief Executive of Dubai Opera Jasper Hope to know more about its plans

What can we expect to see in Dubai Opera house when it opens?

Dubai opera will have ballet classical to musicals and theatre, comedy, family, rock, pop and jazz, ice Shows, magic shows of high quality entertainment. That’s almost 50 shows in 4 months we have been asked comprising a real mix of nationalities and genres.

Do you feel the tension of the importance of such an event?

It’s an incredible opportunity to be the first venue of its kind in the country, for Dubai specifically and so for the region I think it’s really, important and very, very exciting.

If you see what has happened in Dubai in the last few years in industries such as the arts, design and businesses we see D3, Art Week and all such centres and annual events, have combined to make it a very, very exciting place. But for performing arts there is very little choice but now from August we will have great artists, musicians and dancers who will have somewhere to perform.

Would you say Dubai Opera will compete with Royal Opera House Muscat?

They will compete in the sense they both do shows but I think the experience will be different. Royal Opera House Muscat is beautiful but its capacity is 900, while Dubai Opera is more than twice its size. Dubai Opera offers the ultimate flexibility of a proscenium arch theatre, an acoustic concert hall and a 2,000sq m flat floor event space and ranks alongside opera houses found in other parts of the world, such as London, Moscow or Paris. It will allow for approximately 2,000 seats for a concert and up to 1,000 for a gala dinner. This will give the performances a different feeling both for the performing artist as well as a member of the audience. This is a big region and there are a lot of people who want entertainment as part of their lives.

There are ballet groups or orchestras attached to different opera houses. Will Dubai Opera have anything similar?

The answer is no at least not at the beginning. Many opera houses do have artistic ensembles as part of their venues, but there are many differences: firstly they have many hundreds of years and they have musical education programmes and dance programmes for little children all the way through.

The only way to skip all of that is to kind of like in sports when occasionally someone buys a team and they pick it up and move it and give it a different name. But that’s not what we believe it as it’s not a sustainable model for us. If it comes it must come organically.

We have a venue, international artists and we inspire. We start to do educational programmes and if that leads to young performers who are born Emirati or born in the Emirates with parents from another nationality and who go to school and university here and who want to become singers, dancers or even in any other capacity like lighting or arranging a programme, it will happen, we will help them and support them to go internationally and  to go to study with a great musician or a famous dance school, so the idea is to inspire rather than to buy an orchestra and to say that we now own a group or an orchestra.