Three years after it began, the Traction project is finally complete. A review meeting with the European Commission two weeks ago has left us with some loose ends to tie up and a glowing report. It’s been an extraordinary journey for me—learning about opera and digital technology, doing co-creation in a pandemic, and personal griefs. I’ve crossed a stormy ocean and find myself on the shores of a new country, equally hopeful and uncertain. My thinking about community art has been stretched and I don’t yet know how that might influence my work—I’m not even sure what that work might be now.
Before I say goodbye to the ocean and start working out where I am, I want to share Traction’s legacy. The project website is still up, and it contains all the research reports and other materials we produced, but the project’s scale and complexity don’t make it easy to find your way around. So we’ve made a new website, particularly for people who work in opera and the arts. It presents what we’ve learned about co-creation from the perspective of performing arts in a changing world.
The site hosts many resources including a 90 page book about Co-creating Opera that proposes some principles for co-creation:
