Where myth meets modernity: Netia Jones on the future of opera

Netia Jones, award-winning international opera director, film-maker, set designer, and director of Lightmap Studios, is as enmeshed within the opera as one can be. Renowned for her integration of cutting-edge technology into her shows and irreplicable out-of-theatre installations, Jones is pioneering forward the future of opera. In May of 2026, she will be leading the world-premier of the Baroque work, Ercole Amante, with the Paris Opera for its first ever staged debut, unmasking the timeless relevance of what could be mistaken for an ancient story. Jones understands every facet of opera and is able to hold its contradictions: able to revel in the pure adoration of the art form at its best, critique and reckon with its faults, and look forward with hope and realism for the future. Netia Jones sits down with hube to discuss her work at the opera and how she hopes to see the medium adapt and change along with the 21st century.

hube: Next year you will be directing as well as designing the set and costumes of a production of the opera Ercole Amante, which, simply, follows the story of Hercules as he rejects his wife in favour of a younger woman.  How does living in the immersion of heightened emotions—and at times tragedy—contrast with the mundane moments of everyday life? Do you find yourself blending the sentiments, or are you able to compartmentalise the two?

Netia Jones: Opera is about extremes, and maybe that’s why we are drawn to it—because it is timeless for that reason. It addresses very fundamental aspects of being human, and it does so in a highly extreme way, which allows us to really dive deep into those moments. To be a little more precise: Ercole Amante, which is an extraordinary opera, is going to be a world premiere. It was written at the very beginning of the 18th century by a female composer—which is quite something. But it actually deals with the figure of Hercules in a much more interesting and complex way, and perhaps a less dramatic one. He is of a certain age, his power is waning, and he has expelled his wife in favor of a much younger woman—who happens to be his son’s girlfriend. This is a story that theoretically comes from myth, but could just as easily be set in the present day. And that is the strength of the best works of theatre and opera: they are absolutely timeless, and you can recognize their truths no matter when or where they’re set. It’s actually less heroic than it might outwardly appear—but it’s an absolutely brilliant, amazing opera.

h: For you, living in this world, you mean that you don’t really have to compartmentalise them because they’re both so true and so present?

NJ: The idea of compartmentalising is so interesting because in my job I strangely never compartmentalise. I am almost all the time thinking about an opera, therefore living inside of that opera. Compartmentalising would be a very healthy thing to do. But it is actually impossible to do that because to get into the heart and soul of a piece, you do have to immerse yourself in it. It is not possible to compartmentalise. It’s not that you are feeling extreme emotions at all times, but you are grappling with these situations that whichever opera you are working on is dealing with. And it is profoundly affecting. I even find that it affects my actual health, which is not that helpful, but it is really interesting because it’s a reckoning. It’s important, but for that reason, Ercole Amante actually isn’t very upsetting. I find it hilarious and invigorating because it is so recognisable and this slightly pathetic attempt of this older man to seduce this younger woman, who really does not want any part of this, is really, really interesting. These are the stories that we see every day in the press. It’s extraordinary and invigorating to have a story from the point of view of a woman. Normally in opera, what you’re dealing with is the overwhelming violence towards women, or objectification of women, or simple absence of women. So here, where you have something that is very much the opposite of that, that’s really empowering. There really isn’t any separation between my life and the work that I’m doing. Then in the same way, there isn’t really a separation between the operas themselves and my feelings about the operas.

h: Addressing what you said about women and their treatment—if overwhelmingly it’s in a way of mistreatment and abuse, that’s got to vastly be a different experience for you, the one living in it.

NJ: This is an absolute truth of working in an industry where women are routinely belittled and disempowered. And to think that that doesn’t have an impact actually in the industry is naive. It does, and this has always been the case. It’s not simply a question of putting a feminist lens onto a particular story or interpreting it in a different way. The entire art form is tilted in a certain way, and because we’re dealing with pieces that were written 400, 300, 200, 100 years ago, they carry with them all of those ambivalences or prejudices, and it can become absolutely overwhelming without any doubt. That should be acknowledged.

It’s the first time I’ve ever heard anybody articulate that as you have articulated it. I speak in a slightly different way about it because I speak about the canon itself. I speak quite a lot about the repertoire and the problems of the repertoire, but not even in a very simplistic way because these things across time have changed. They’ve had peaks and troughs, and so you often find very powerful women or very powerful parts for women throughout the 18th century. But then at the turn of the century, when we see an absolute kind of pushback against this new empowerment of women, the 19th-century repertoire is incredibly harmful, and it does impact you when you’re working on it. But what can also impact you, which has nothing really to do with gender, is actually sometimes the bleakness of some stories.

I have recently directed  the opera Peter Grimes in Göteborgsoperan, which is on the west coast of Sweden. It was in January and February, so the darkest and coldest months of the year. It was absolutely perfect for the opera. It could not have been more appropriate. Göteborgsoperan is right on the sea. It has a long maritime history. Everything worked perfectly for the opera. But I became almost unwell because it was so intense. It was intense for the performers as well. You have to really confront that story. It doesn’t have any silver lining, it doesn’t have any feeling of redemption in any way. It’s just a very upsetting and very truthful story. I was really impacted by that. I wouldn’t have not done it. I would still do it again knowing that it’s going to make me a bit ill, but it really is impossible to disentangle the experience of immersing yourself in a piece like that and the impact of the piece. You hope that it has that impact on the audience, but you also hope and know that that’s a shorter period for the audience. It’s a single evening’s immersion, but in order to get that experience for the audience, you do have to do that to yourself for the whole period of the preparation of the piece.

h: How long was that, the preparation and the running?

NJ: It’s a really interesting thing in opera because you are rehearsing it for six weeks or eight weeks, but you are living with the piece from the time that you’re asked to do it. In opera, that tends to be about two years. It can be up to six years ahead, but you’re not only living with that piece. The strange thing is straight away after I did the opera Peter Grimes, I went to Australia to do A Fairy Queen, which couldn’t be more different. It’s light, it’s funny, it’s full of love. It’s a piece full of joy and humanity and laughter. It was a perfect tonic. You want both. You couldn’t have a life of just creating frothy entertainment. It would mean nothing. But actually, to be in Sydney, Australia doing this very kind of open and joyful piece was nice. In the year before that, as you’re preparing all of these pieces, you have all kinds of different lives because they embody very different kinds of things. There’s never just one piece in preparation. There’s always about six in the studio. We have about six projects simultaneously that are going to appear at different times on stage.

Rehearsal is usually about six weeks and that usually depends on which country you are in because each country has got a very specific way of putting on an opera. Some really have a very short rehearsal period. Some have a very extended rehearsal period, and that really is just about the particular house, but the average is a six-week period. You’re running up against it every single day and every single night, and you actually never think about anything else. What happens is you wake up and a part of it is running through your mind just because you are in such an intense immersion into this piece. It very much overtakes you for that whole six weeks. Within those six weeks, there is a kind of journey. The third week of any rehearsal period is always awful. Everybody has all just had it. Everybody’s had enough. The human capacity is only so much, and also for the level of concentration and commitment. Things don’t go well in the third week. Now that I’m quite experienced, and I’ve done it for a very long time, I know what the pattern is, so I don’t really panic at the beginning. You think, oh, this is all going horribly wrong. This is a disaster. But I recognise that feeling now. I know that the third week will be a challenge. Then as you turn that corner and the thing starts coming together, it always improves. It just starts going back uphill again. But it’s physically and mentally exhausting by week three because you are working every day. I tend to be working all through the weekend. That’s just the nature of the job because, as you know, I’m across all parts of the piece. There’s always something. By that stage in the rehearsal period, it’s usually overseeing a lot of the video because the video tends to be the last thing that comes into the puzzle, and therefore the weekend tends to be taken up with a video. But that’s a very different thing—dealing with computers and video is not the same as dealing with people and emotion. It is easy. Computers are easy, people are complicated.

h: There’s a way in which the opera transcends time, with a single production using the same words and melodies to evoke the same emotions – some for hundreds of years at a time—even as the world around it completely changes. When you work and live in this state of timelessness, we’re curious if and how it affects or warps your own perception of the contemporary challenges and feats of our time.

NJ: Opera is a really interesting lens through which to explore contemporary challenges because, it is the same words and the same music for 300 years or 400 or 200 or 100, but they begin to mean different things or they have a different nuance or they have a different kind of shade. You have become very aware of both sides of the coin. You become very aware of progress. That is to say, what has changed in society, therefore what feels a little bit alien or unusual. But more often, you become very aware, crisply aware, of the things that have stayed the same. These are very often things with which we still struggle. I’m talking less about the kind of fundamental human interactions. They will never change—the essential aspects of being a human being, which are about ambition and love and jealousy and all of our flaws, anger, the kind of essentials of what makes up a human being. But I’m talking really more about the things that don’t seem to somehow be improved. These are balances of power, manipulation, corruption, and of course, gender imbalance. These are the aspects that are shocking when they feel very contemporary. But it’s something that was written 300 years ago. It shocks you because you think, surely in all this time we’ve made some progress in these aspects, but very often we haven’t. Those things have remained really, really the same. Another interesting lens to look through is when we talk about technology or technical progress because opera has always engaged with technology, and that’s really interesting. Opera loved technology right from the beginning because theatre making is about surprise and delight. Opera makers 300, 400 years ago, were using the latest technologies of the time. Over the course of history, all productions of opera have explored whatever is the latest technology. That is where you see change in quite an exhilarating way because the things that they were attempting with mechanics in say the 18th century, we can now do digitally in the 21st century. Those sleight of hand—what you can do to create surprise and delight in the theatre these days is very extraordinary. You become very, very aware of amazing technical progress that we as humans have made. It’s not all for the good, clearly, but it is shockingly impressive, and it’s incremental. Technology just leaps forward on this exponential curve. It’s not even a kind of gentle straight line. It goes steadily on a sharper pitch, which is when you are looking at it in terms of what is possible in terms of theatre making. Yeah, that part of it is extraordinary.

h: Is there one show in particular that exemplifies this idea of the story being the same and the technology being completely new?

NJ: The best examples in the work that I have been exploring are always when I’m addressing a piece of Baroque music. Because as you know, in Baroque times, they spent a lot of money on the technical installation. What they were searching for was very rapid changes of scene because in a Baroque opera, you can move from one scene to another extremely quickly. They unfolded (cloths) and they moved scenery, and it was all about being extraordinary. Now, with digital technology, specifically with projection, but with all kinds of aspects of digital technology, we’re doing the same thing, but we’re doing it in a much lighter way. We don’t really need to construct anything in actual three dimensions. We can do it all virtually. Those are the moments that we are doing the exact same thing, but we are just doing it with a very new technology.

hube: What is a school of thought or belief that has completely changed for you during your time in opera? What happened?

NJ: That’s a very easy answer. All my life working in opera, nobody—or perhaps a couple of women writers and female academics—but basically, nobody was talking about the position of women in the canon. They weren’t even talking about the position of women in the industry. Nobody cared, nobody noticed, and nobody cared. You would look up on the stage and the creative team would be all men, and you’d look through the brochure and every single director, almost every single designer, was a man. The only time that you saw a woman was in the costume design, but it was all men. All the conductors were men. It was just all men. It belonged to men. Nobody seemed to either notice or care. This was my whole career, this is the truth. Then Me Too happened. Now, Me Too wasn’t anything to do with opera at that time. And it wasn’t really to do with the number of women in opera either, but it was a seismic shift of the before and the after. Usually, you can’t see a before and an after, things happen gradually or slightly imperceptibly. But I can literally tell you that almost from one day to another, when that movement hit the papers, there was a sudden almost panic-like shift in opera managements that began to count the women. There were actual movements that were counting women, that were actually one in France: where are the women?

With my assistant in my studio, I began a project around that time of counting the women, just seeing where the women were working in opera, what kind of impact that was making on the kinds of storytelling that were happening. There were definitely companies where the number was zero, and where the number continues to be zero, but so many actually began to think about what those numbers are looking like.

Then, by extrapolation, it calls for a reevaluation of many of these stories that no one ever paid much attention to—stories that have actually been quite harmful to women. I mean, no one cared because the music is so beautiful. Either people don’t really listen to the words—but that doesn’t make them any less damaging — or they forgive the content because the music is beautiful.

But it does matter what the story is. Everything we reiterate—especially when we reiterate it under a veil of great beauty—carries a message. And we have to take responsibility for that message, whether it’s subliminal or overt. We have to be careful about it, and we have to stand behind it. I didn’t think this would happen in my lifetime. I really didn’t. I couldn’t—it had been so long. That world was a male bastion. It really was a closed castle. And now, the fact that this change is happening so rapidly—it’s extraordinary. Yes, the numbers are still ridiculously and insanely imbalanced. But this is a real, actual seismic shift—and I’ve witnessed it. There’s nothing else quite like it.

h: Music has been proven to temper the emotions of the listener, with happy songs having the ability to lift a mood and vice versa. Do you notice a difference in your own temperament depending on the tone of the opera you’re currently working on? And do you find that music can be used as a tool to mask harm?

NJ: Yes, I know that to be true. It can happen deliberately, and it can happen accidentally, or rather just carelessly. I have experienced this even very, very recently. I have experienced that historically throughout my life because I work in a very problematic industry. But I have even witnessed that very, very recently in France at an opera. I won’t say any more about it, but I was horrified and appalled by what was happening on the stage without any kind of context. It was absolutely not in the libretto, and it was enabled and kind of sugared by this incredibly beautiful music. It was an act of absolute misogyny, violent misogyny within a very beautiful opera. It wasn’t necessary. It didn’t add anything to the story. I suspect the director felt that it was edgy because violence towards women is often seen as edgy, and male directors are applauded and encouraged towards this edginess, which often means the degradation and the demeaning of women.

The music absolutely allows it. It masks it. It hides it, and it’s not a new idea. In fact, Catherine (Clément) wrote a book in 1987, called Opera or the Undoing of Women, she does point out that this very idea, that the beauty of the music in the opera masks and camouflages some, not just problematic, but some actually harmful ideas and text, and it’s not confronted clearly enough. Sometimes when there is a confrontation with it, there’s an incredible backlash. People are so strange about opera as if it’s sacrosanct or untouchable, but it can’t be. If it is to be with us in the world today, in society, in the communities that we want to create, it can’t be untouchable. Nothing should be, there should be no such thing as dogma, which is untouchable. This is where all the problems lie. Any dogma that can’t be changed causes harm in the future by definition. Opera is not an exception to that. Opera is the same.

h: Is there one show in particular that inspires you?

NJ: I have a favourite company called Dumb Type in Japan. I just love their work. They do installations. They’re an art collaborative more than anything else. What I really like about Dumb Type is that there’s kind of no boundaries for them. That’s what I have enjoyed in the work that I have done as well, in that I don’t really make a boundary between directing and design or working in a concert hall or a theatre or an opera house or an art gallery or a museum, or sometimes in a site-specific location on a beach in a town. I don’t really believe in borders and boundaries. I don’t really believe in separation, and I really like the idea of a practice that can just exist in myriad different spaces and is just a way of creating work. They’re also very high-tech, and I’ve always clearly loved that. There isn’t really any one production or piece that would embody that. But if you asked me what my favourite company is, that would be them.

h: Your work is very international, with your studio Lightmap having worked on multimedia design for shows in San Francisco, Ireland, New Zealand—which is a feat itself. All the more so when you consider the role of language in opera, with many viewers not speaking the language that the show is performed in while still experiencing an intense emotional reaction. What, if anything, has working in this medium taught you about communication and unification? What do you think the role of language is in it?

NJ: One thing about opera throughout its history is it has always been international. That is to say, it’s never had borders. If we think about Mozart, he could not have written his music had he not travelled all across Europe and gathered all kinds of styles and ideas. He really collected, he was a collector, so he collected all of these kinds of inspirations from many, many different countries. Since its inception, opera has travelled. It is by very definition international, which is a very, very nice space to work in. Language is an intriguing part of opera making because we’re often working in a language other than our own, from where I stand.

I love that because I love language. I just love the exchange between languages. I find it super interesting, the ideas that you can get from understanding a culture via learning its language. I studied modern languages, so I’m interested in all aspects of language, semantics, etymology, the history of language, the culture of language, all of these things. I do speak quite a few languages, which, interestingly in opera, if you work as an opera director, nobody’s even impressed. If you speak six languages, you are kind of expected to speak six languages. You are expected to just be able to go into French and Italian and German. That’s just part of the job. That suits me because I’m really interested in language, but this lovely question about whether listening and experiencing something in a different language to your own presents any kind of challenges.

Things changed overnight, again, when surtitles and subtitles became very easy for companies to do when they weren’t so fluent and they weren’t so accessible and affordable and easy. The challenge of watching an opera in a language that you really don’t understand was quite high. Although in opera, really the story is told through the music rather than the words, but not having a clue about what’s going on is tough. For example, if I’m working in an opera in Czech, I’m about to do Rusalka and it’s in Czech, and obviously, that is gobbledygook to me, which is quite unusual because normally I do understand the language of the opera. There is a certain kind of barrier. But once you really know that opera, the language doesn’t matter. Opera is one of those things that you do need to do homework before you go to one. The more preparation that you do when you’re watching an opera, the more you’re going to get out of it. It’s so strange, an opera, because you are supposed to know the whole story before you go. You are even supposed to know the ending. It’s not that the ending is going to be a surprise to you when you’re in the theatre, you know exactly what’s going to happen, and in a way, the more you know, the more you can appreciate it because you can allow the music to do the words rather than the text. That fundamentally is what an opera is doing.

h: You have achieved several enormously ambitious shows staged outdoors, including Everlasting Light, which was created at a nuclear power station, as well as The Way to the Sea, which used the participation of a town in coastal England. The two seem to walk opposite sides of the same line, with the ocean evoking peace, and nuclear being the all-time symbol of war and violence. Walk me through the manifestation of these projects, and the juxtaposition of managing or embracing the influence of their respective essence on the production.

NJ: Everlasting Light was my favourite project that I’ve ever done in my entire career. It was an extraordinary project. It was set at a nuclear power station on a beach and explored the idea of the promise of a nuclear future from the time that the power station was built, which was in 1961. In 1961, there was an expression called the white heat of technology. It was the idea that there was a kind of headlong tilt towards exciting progress. It wasn’t as simple as nuclear is bad in many ways, specifically environmentally. It’s very clear that we will need nuclear energy if we’re going to make any kind of impact on our emissions. It was a very exciting project because it was outdoors. It dealt with the elements in a way that obviously you are not doing inside a theatre. It was a terrifying project in every way. It happened in the same year as the Fukushima accident, the tsunami. There is always a very highly wrought feeling when you’re dealing with the topic of anything nuclear, because in many minds, nuclear energy and nuclear war collide as the same thing.

I explored this thorny issue via microtonal music, and I was interested in the microcosmic and the macrocosmic in that nuclear science obviously was enabled by our capacity to go smaller and smaller and smaller, and it actually made us think in this very large-scale way about the universe and man’s place in the universe. But what you have when you do a site-specific performance is you have those things that you can’t control.

For example, I was projecting onto this enormous nuclear power station. We did projection mapping, which apparently the fishermen miles out at sea could see and thought, “What’s going on?” They were very confused by this art happening on the nuclear power station. But you had occasional moments that were so majestic and so extraordinary and so way above what you could achieve as a human being because the sky would participate. We’d have an amazing sunset behind the nuclear power station, or the final vestiges of the sun would blaze through a particular moment in the music, or it would start lightly to rain at another specific point. We had flocks of birds flying past at specific moments, these moments of natural chance where the wonder of the natural world came to bear on our manmade peace in our very manmade location and created an extraordinary conversation. It made this nuclear power station, which is in essence a kind of bunker, like a concrete bunker, incredibly beautiful, and it was a very, very extraordinary project for that reason.

The location gave me everything that I needed for that exploration because this nuclear power station was built in 1961 next door to a tiny little fishing village, which had been there since the 12th century. It had this ancient history and this futuristic kind of space landing that had happened when the nuclear power station went there. There was so much to explore, and I could explore music of that time, very complex microtonal music of that time and really ancient music as well. It was a mystical and magical project. Unrepeatable, I will never get anything close to that because nature was a protagonist in that piece. In a way it was a very ambitious piece, but it was also just so very open to thinking. 

The other piece, The Way to the Sea where we took over a village, was a very different feeling because that was very much about the human in the environment. The village that we took over, you couldn’t tell it, but it was actually a manmade village. They made it in the thirties as an ideal of the perfect village. It was an imagined, very suburban kind of perfect village. There’s a beautiful lake in it, but it’s a manmade lake, and the houses are all very lovely, but they’re tudor. That is to say, they’re built in the Tudor style, but they were built in the 1930s. They’re absolutely fiction. They’re like a work of theatre. The whole village is like a work of theatre. When we took it over and I put people all around the village, and the audience had to walk around the whole village, and I put somebody standing in the middle of the lake, again, that village itself made the story, but it really was, that story was about how humans see themselves and slightly fictionalise their own experience because of course, behind all of this façade, the normal kind of struggles of being human were still happening. It was all a little bit pretend. People were still fighting and hiding things. The realities, the mess of human life, was still very much there.

I don’t think I could have done either of those projects had they not been so ambitious and site-specific. Something given to you by the sheer size of a site-specific project, because in a theatre, of course, you have that geography, but it’s a psycho-geography. It has to happen in the mind of the audience. Whereas then you are literally guiding the audience in this terrain, and all things come into play, the temperature and the weather, and they have a 360-degree experience. I love to do them. They’re really a nightmare, so much that can go wrong, but they are unrepeatable and absolutely brilliant experiences.

h: What do you hope for the art of opera going forward?

NJ: I am optimistic about opera. Quite often in this country, there are newspaper articles about the death of opera, and there have been for a very long time. Art forms don’t die. The media come and go. It’s likely that television may go altogether. We’ll replace television with something else. But art forms, poetry, writing, playmaking, opera, they shift and change, but they don’t disappear. What I see now in my new job at the Royal Opera House is so many young people wanting to make operas. It must still be relevant. It must still be something that people feel, this is the way that I’d like to express whatever the story or the landscape that they want to express is. I am very keen on absorbing technology into opera making. Opera making has always done that. Technology will continue to be exciting in opera making. But all I can hope really is that we grapple with the challenges of the repertoire in that it is very misogynistic, it is very racist, it is very patriarchal. We need to go headlong into these things because it is also astonishing. It can affect you as an audience in a very special and overwhelming way. It’s everything. It is fully immersive. Of course, it is. It’s everything.

The other thing about it is it doesn’t make any kind of profit. It always is going to make a huge loss. The more we can do that, the better. Because everything becomes very commercial. Year on year, things become about profit, and opera will never be about that. It must be about something else. Therefore, it must be about communication. It’s about how we communicate with each other and how we interpret the world that we’re in. It’s a fully collaborative experience. More than two or three hundred people are involved in the actual creation of an opera, at least a hundred more than a hundred. Sometimes up to 200 people are actually in the opera. You can have an orchestra of 80 people and 80 people on the stage, but then you have everybody else. You have the entire crew who are creating it backstage, the whole costume department, the whole set building department, and then the whole administrative department in the opera house. We have more than a thousand employees, and everybody is actually collaborating and working together to make one thing, which is this performance on the stage. It’s an extraordinary human endeavour. It’s not done for any reason other than we believe in it, and that is very life affirming.