The art of POP: discovering Paris Opera Play

In the midst of the Covid pandemic, almost every major opera and ballet company began to embrace video streaming as the only way of keeping their artists busy and staying in touch with their audiences. But with the lockdowns now behind us, attitudes have varied. Where some houses have heavily reduced their video activity or abandoned it altogether, the Opéra national de Paris have doubled down on their streaming investment and created a substantial in-house offering, launched in March 2023 as Paris Opera Play (POP).

The Opéra realised that video streaming would continue to be an invaluable tool for reaching people unable to attend performances, for whatever reason: mobility, cost, distance, or simply because some performances sell out too quickly to bag tickets. The Opéra’s mandate from their various public funders makes strong demands that they make their art available to the widest possible audience, and POP has become a key asset to help fulfil that mandate, adding to existing programmes of education and outreach. Video streaming would also showcase the Opéra’s work internationally – a fact that can’t have escaped government funders well aware of the need for cultural soft power in a difficult world.

In its two years of life, POP has grown to a substantial offering. At time of writing, the video catalogue includes 55 operas, 38 ballets (both classical, neoclassical and contemporary), 32 concerts, 46 documentaries and 22 ballet masterclasses. That number is still growing rapidly: around eight or nine times a season, a production is live-streamed and added to the catalogue, and the Opéra is also engaged in an active programme of purchasing rights to videos from previous seasons that they don’t already own.

As a result, the platform is growing by an average of three or four titles per month. (Occasionally, titles are removed when their rights expire, but this is tried to be kept to a minimum.) Some new videos are produced in collaboration with third parties – the Opéra has long-standing relationships with broadcasters such as France TV and Arte, and these are continuing. But others are fully in-house: motorised pan-tilt-zoom cameras have now been installed in both Palais Garnier and Opéra Bastille, enabling the creation of video at a far lower cost than traditional TV production, with greater shot flexibility than the traditional “two cameras in row J” approach.

The inclusion of large-scale classical ballet performances on the platform is one of its most distinctive and popular features. In the current “Most watched on POP” list, seven of the ten entries are ballets. Last year, Don Quixote and Paquita were the top choices, but another much-watched item is the opening gala from the 2014 season, which includes the famous Défilé of the Paris Opera Ballet’s Étoiles, Soloists and Corps de Ballet, as well as specially chosen pieces and performances by the students of the Ballet School. Tickets for the real gala sell out in a heartbeat, so one can guess that the popularity of this video comes from the sense of being made part of a generally unattainable special occasion.

On the opera side, it’s often the newest streams which do best – perhaps opera fans are more tuned into seeing the latest thing, with Rameau’s Castor et Pollux (somewhat to my surprise) being the most watched in 2024. When a live stream is broadcast for the first time, at the time of the performance (the next one coming up is Iranian director Shirin Neshat’s production of Aida, on 10th October), it then becomes available as “Replay” for a limited period, after which it is only available in the catalogue.

All streams are available via subscription: €99 per year or €9.90 per month (with 50% off for under 28s). Live and Replay streams are also available on a pay-per-view basis at €14.90, which makes POP’s pricing model somewhat idiosyncratic: although it’s common for a streaming platform to have different pricing for the latest content, it’s unusual for it to go immediately into the subscription library at a price significantly lower than it can be watched as a pay-per-view. (In addition, the cancellation process for subscriptions is very straightforward and immediate.) Barrie Kosky’s outrageously camp take on Offenbach’s Les Brigands was a highlight this summer: it’s Offenbach as you’ve never seen him and takes irreverence to a level that one can be sure the composer would have adored. (It will be available to view again from 1st December.)

Another recommendation – this time by the team at POP themselves – is the 2023 production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, directed by Thomas Jolly, the year before he rose to international attention as the creator of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Paris Olympics. It’s a spectacular show, with an exceptional cast led by Benjamin Bernheim and Elsa Dreisig in the title roles. Sets and costumes are the stuff of pure fantasy, with an astonishing street-dance based choreography by Josépha Madoki, anticipating the huge success of Breaking at the Olympics.

But it’s made even more interesting if you watch Priscilla Pizzato’s accompanying documentary, which follows Jolly and his team through auditions and rehearsals, giving a real sense of what he is trying to achieve. For French language nerds, there’s a particularly hilarious exchange when Jolly is obsessing about whether or not the “t” in “fait en” should be silent and Bernheim pacifies him with a carefully judged compromise.

As the years of experience with POP build up, the expertise in filming improves, as do relationships between the video directors and the production teams in charge of the live performances. Of course, some shows are more difficult to capture on video than others. Serious creativity was needed to film Alexander Ekman’s Play, with its plethora of plastic balls being thrown into the audience, while productions with action veiled behind a scrim may be highly atmospheric in the theatre but present severe headaches for the video team.

Although a large proportion of POP users come from Paris and its environs, there’s also a significant contingent from the rest of France, as well as 30% from other countries, the largest viewership coming from the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom. The Paris Opéra Ballet’s recent tour to Japan has demonstrated the huge appetite for classical ballet there (we can confirm this from the interest in Naomi Mori’s review), demonstrated also by high viewing figures for the seven episode documentary Dancing in Tokyo filmed behind the scenes and available on the platform.

The documentaries and masterclasses are also an important showcase for the company in an educational environment. Special pricing is available for educational establishments, works councils and other institutions, and the Opéra is increasing its number of partnerships where institutions share each other’s work. The POP team are also using the documentaries to provide curated offerings around themes of the moment (the latest coming in parallel with the Cannes Film Festival).

With the video technology behind the platform now highly stable, video streaming adapts relatively gracefully to low Internet or device speeds. Still, there’s a whole roadmap of technical features to be improved or added. Last year, the POP team added Smart TV apps for both Apple TV and Android TV, allowing owners of those devices to use POP without an external computer or phones/tablets with Airplay or Chromecast. They hope to add more. Meanwhile, on the web platform, a free text search function is on its way – something that is sorely needed and will become more so as the number of titles increases.

In the end, the success of the platform relies on persuading people to pay for online content, in a world where a great deal of content is available free: even some of the Opéra national de Paris’ best material is to be found both on OperaVision and on free-to-air TV channels. The Opéra has no desire to change this – after all, the whole idea is to have their performances showcased as widely as they can possibly manage, and at the moment, they’re happy with the rate at which POP is being taken up. The first two years have passed without a single month in which subscriber numbers decreased – they will be hoping that this pattern continues.

Paris Opera Play is available for €99 per year or €9.90 per month (with 50% off for under 28s). It is available on Apple TV, Android TV, Orange TV and via Airplay and Chromecast.
play.operadeparis.fr

This article is also available in Japanese.

This article was sponsored by Opéra national de Paris.