ENO is for Everyone

The Black Lives Matter movement is a pivotal moment in our history. It is only right that as an organisation we respond thoughtfully by looking at our values, how we work, and how to contribute towards making a better world, for every person, of every ethnicity.

Over the coming days, weeks, months and years we will commit to trying to get it right, or at least very much better.

Curated and directed by Simone Ibbett-Brown  and film by Nick Kofi, nine people from around the world and living in London sing, dance, speak and play, exploring what it means to raise your voice for the colour of your skin.

Watch all 7 videos

English National Opera is the national opera house for everyone.

We were founded on the principle that we are open and accessible to anyone, whoever they are.

Therefore our diversity and inclusion strategy has to be right to ensure the ENO delivers its core purpose.

Statistics

As part of our desire to work effectively with and for people with lived experience of racism, the ENO have comprehensively reviewed the language we use. As we seek to broaden our diversity and inclusion strategy we are keen to learn more about how this can be engrained not just in the physical representation in our company, but also in our language. Therefore as we continue to work to be any ally for all those who experience racism, we will continuously review the preferred terms of reference for people in the UK. We hope that any mistakes in our communication around diversity and inclusion can be seen in the context of a sincere intention to do better.

We are proud that in recent years we have made some headway in terms of representation amongst our workforce. We aim to be in line with the diverse makeup of the United Kingdom with a minimum of 13% ethnically diverse employees, but are also conscious of the increased diversity level of 43% in our theatre’s home city of London.

20% of ENO’s principal freelance performers in our last season were people who are ethnically diverse and we are committed to ensuring this level of representation on stage is maintained whenever possible.

13% of our Chorus is similarly represented and 16% of our Board – to be transparent, that is two out of 12 people.

Representation on our Management Team is poor with only one person who is ethnically diverse, which must be rectified. We have made strides but clearly we need to go further.

Other programmes

Already existing programmes include a paid mentoring programme for five people who are ethnically diverse every year who work closely with more established directors.

This provides opportunities to learn about main scale opera, develop skills and make the relationships that can support individual career progression.

We announced earlier this year that we will be hiring five members of the orchestra who are ethnically diverse from the beginning of our new season and have been delighted that we have had more than fifty applicants for the positions.

This is particularly important as we have no representation in our orchestra at the present time.

Last year we launched our ENO Chorus Fellowship for people who are ethnically diverse, resulting in four new singers joining our chorus for our past season. We also introduced a mentoring scheme for aspiring critics to encourage more diverse voices into the industry, and to counteract the predominately white, male voices who currently act as gatekeepers to the art form.

More than 50% of the participants last season were female, with a similar percentage from an ethnically diverse background.

We screen auditions so that those auditioning for roles are completely anonymized to the casting panel – they perform behind a screen, walk on a carpet, do not talk and do not have their gender, age, sexuality, ethnicity or physical ability status on any application form.

We extend this to other roles within ENO – a screened application process removes an applicant’s name, age, education institutions and gender. We believe this allows candidates to relay their values and approach to a position above all else.

Our vision

We want to commit to ensuring that everyone feels like the ENO is their opera company. This means that we will commit to telling a wider range of stories on stage.

We will continue to commit to diverse and inclusive casting on stage.

We will ensure that our workforce represents the diverse makeup of the country we live in, at all levels of the organisation.

And we want to ensure that everyone feels welcome when they step through the doors of the London Coliseum.

ENO is for everyone, and always will be.