Draft:Companions Opera

Companions Opera, also known as The Companions BV, was a private-held Dutch opera company founded by Peter Kroone and headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, operating from 1993 until 2008. The company gained prominence for its approach to opera productions: they “organised so-called 360-degree operas, performed in sports stadiums where the stage covered the entire floor of the arena and the audience sat around it.”

It started with a 10-year run of Opera in Ahoy, held from 1993 to 2002 at the Ahoy Sportpaleis in Rotterdam, where all opera productions premiered.

From 1998 to 2008, the company extended its reach by presenting these productions in various international cities such as Paris, Shanghai, Munich, Zurich, Hamburg, and Basel. Over a span of 15 years, Companions Opera produced more than 30 opera productions.

History
The genesis of Companions Opera can be traced to the early 1990s when there were experimental efforts to stage Verdi’s Aida in indoor sports venues in both England by Harvey Goldsmith and the Netherlands. Drawing inspiration from these initiatives, Companions Opera and the Ahoy Sportpaleis in Rotterdam initiated a collaboration in 1992, culminating in the inception of Opera in Ahoy: a series of opera presentations within the Ahoy arena.

Officially inaugurated in January 1994, Companions Opera made a debut with a double bill performance of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci in a "360 degree" format. The new concept of the "360 degree" staging faced some skepticism from the press and public after a bad reception of Aida in the exhibition center Rai in Amsterdam in the summer 1993. Eventually the pre-press and reviews by the media about the double bill performance ensured that a second edition could be planned. For January 1995 Bizet’s Carmen was announced.

In the next two years Companions Opera brought Puccini’s final masterpiece Turandot, and Verdi's Aida to Rotterdam. During these productions, Ahoy (part of the European Arenas Association) and Companions Opera started to invite arena managers to experience the concept and to discuss opportunities to bring productions abroad.

The final three Ahoy-productions - La Traviata (2000), Nabucco (2001) and Il Trovatore (2002) - marked by interpretations that deviated from traditional realism. La Traviata, for instance, featured a setup where the arena floor was empty, except for the enlarged sheets of Verdi's original music score on the floor, to realise “intangible emotion in a circle of emptiness” in the final act.

A few years earlier, in 1998, Companions Opera produced their first two productions outside Rotterdam: Aida in the Gelredome Arena in Arnhem and Carmen in the Sportpaleis Arena in Antwerp. In 2001 Companions Opera produced an open-air Rigoletto-production for the Rotterdam Cultural Capital City of 2001, set in the harbour of Rotterdam.

International productions
In the ensuing years, the productions of Companions Opera initiated interest from arena managers internationally. After the 1998-production of Carmen in Antwerp, Aida was performed in the new soccer stadium of Schalke 04 in Gelsenkirchen, in collaboration with the Neue Philharmonie Westfalen and its conductor Johannes Wildner. Almost at the same time Aida was performed in Stade de France in Paris, being the first Aida performance since 1968 in Paris. The original Aida-arena production was re-designed to fit the large stadiums. A few months later, in December 2001, La Traviata was performed in the Olympiahalle in Munich.

After Aida Companions Opera developed and produced two more stadium productions: Carmen (2003) and a new production of Nabucco (2005). Nabucco was subsequently also resized to be presented in arenas. From 2001 onwards the famous three operas (Aida, Carmen and Nabucco) brought Companions Opera to several cities in Germany, Basel and Zurich in Switzerland, Shanghai in China and back to Paris, France.

Companions Opera staged their last production, Nabucco, in September 2008 in Stade de France in Paris. The financial crises that started in 2008, and the introduction of opera in cinemas via high definition streaming, made it no longer affordable for Companions Opera to develop and stage large scale opera productions.