LONDON: Thirty years ago, Val Bourne created the Dance Umbrella festival at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, west London. Here, in direct contrast to the traditional UK Royal Ballet, was a young and thrusting creative force. Dance exploded on to the arts scene, while ballet continued to plough its more traditional furrow of Nutcrackers and Swan Lakes. “When we started out,” says Bourne, “we were a showcase for the British independent dance scene. (The UK dance scene at the time) was 12 companies and four soloists, and that was it. Now there are 300 to choose from. There has been an explosion of activity and interest.”

A host of companies and artists including Michael Clark, Shobana Jeyasingh, Lloyd Newson’s DV8 and Matthew Bourne’s Adventures in Motion Pictures, supported by decent funding and with a feeling of real cutting edge, took dance to new audiences up and down the country. Growing directly out of this movement, Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, both a homage to and raspberry at ballet, packed theatres in London’s West End.

So how does this compare to the opera scene? Fifteen years ago, when I started out, I was thrilled to become part of David Pountney’s English National Opera, the company everyone wanted to work for. I will never forget seeing Pountney’s production of The Makropoulos Case in my late teens. Here was something magnificent, provocative, inspiring and challenging. Radical, politicised work by the likes of Pountney, Graham Vick and David Alden at ENO was supported by a small raft of independent companies such as Opera Factory, who reworked the classics or produced sexy new operas.

In the years since, opera has grown exponentially. In 1992 there were 37 opera companies working in the UK; a decade later there were 147. And yet, most of the fringe companies of the 80s have disappeared. Opera’s biggest growth area is the most conservative, both through the booming country house opera movement and the big touring companies such as Raymond Gubbay’s stadium opera, which present traditional repertoire in a traditional manner.

The core product today is similar across the board: productions of primarily 18th- and 19th-century works, in a variety of styles, from the cutting edge (usually produced by the now-safe rebels of the 80s) to the wonderfully traditional. With large opera companies nowadays steered by managers rather than artists (15 years ago every major company had a director of productions, now there are none) it’s hardly surprising that none can demonstrate a strong personal artistic thrust. Where once there was a sense of revolution, opera now looks more like ballet than dance.

Part of the story, of course, is funding. As of the latest spending review, the Arts Council fund 71 dance organisations, but only eight that produce opera professionally. Risk, the lifeblood of creativity, is shunned rather than embraced. Opera, unlike dance, is no longer making its own stars, and is instead leeching off the successes of other art forms: staging musicals, hiring film directors, desperately grappling for the next big thing. As in so many areas now, the emphasis is on creative PR, like the Royal Opera’s stunt this week of offering an entire performance of Don Giovanni exclusively to readers of the London-based tabloid Sun newspaper.

So where is the bold and daring spirit of experimentation that might, like Dance Umbrella did for ballet, help to dust off the art form and start building the future?

Partly, the future lies in initiatives under the wings of our bigger organisations most support research and development arms. However, their focus is on the artist rather than the audience: very few of these experiments reach any kind of public, and what little funding that exists is proving unstable.

Another pointer lies in the huge growth of education, again under the wings of our opera companies, as well as specialists like English Pocket Opera, Music Platform and Streetwise Opera. Here, young people and community groups are welcomed as the audience, but also as participants to experience the raw power of opera.

But new works without audiences, and community work without a forward-looking “main house”, can’t alone pave the way for a strong future. Where else can we look for the opera of the 22nd century? When it works, opera is the most sensual, inspiring, all-encompassing and provocative of art forms, and the bulk of our smaller opera companies, including my own ,Tete a Tete, are driven by committed artists inspired to harness this power. Amazingly, 10 new companies have formed for every one from the 80s that has collapsed. If our main houses have lost the confidence to create their own stars, maybe they will start to connect properly with opera’s booming fringe. And maybe the funding system will begin to address the bottom of the pyramid as well as the top, for these fringe companies are not only usually unfunded, but are competing for tour dates against theatre and dance, which are both cheaper and better subsidised.

In an echo of Dance Umbrella’s initiative 30 years ago, Tete a Tete started an umbrella festival last year, also at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios, with a programme of over 25 new works. This year, we have more than 30 new pieces, including the supremely elegant Patricia Rozario playing an opera-mad taxi driver; an undergraduate composer from the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England, who is bringing down her own orchestra to explore shopping and anorexia; and a young company presenting the extraordinary story of Kaspar Hauser. Though functioning without subsidy, this year we’re hosting Scottish Opera and Opera North, and are already discussing 2009 with Welsh National Opera. Perhaps our bigger companies are beginning to look to the fringe after all.

The ENO revolution of the 80s showed how opera could be sexy without changing its name. Is the next step for building opera for the 22nd century just a really sturdy umbrella?—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service