Is there a point to making ‘world opera’ or new music theatre in our time of global financial and political precarity, climate change and protest? As I write, marchers voice their anger on the streets of downtown Hong Kong, on the spot where student protester Alex Chow fell and died seven days earlier; demonstrators battle police at Santiago's (Chile) Plaza Italia; supporters of the homeless in Las Vegas (USA) were heard chanting the slogans, ‘housing not handcuffs’ and ‘poverty is not a crime’ outside the mayor's office. Such is our context around the globe. And if that is the case, isn't there a need to seek better justification for our inclination to keep making opera and other forms of music theatre?

Opera is traditionally expensive to generate. It is also tedious to tour, while new opera is notoriously difficult to sell to both old and young audiences alike. What does an art form so precious among the world's elite mean to do in Africa? In this opening chapter, I attempt to offer ways of reading music theatre and opera as viable platforms for exploring, rather than avoiding, the persistent asymmetries of power between the global North and South, as well as the hidden contingencies these asymmetries portend.

A seemingly obvious temptation in this endeavour, then, may be to begin by offering definitions or justifications for certain recurring issues: What is an opera? How does it differ from a musical? Is new opera even music or does it instead belong in the performance arenas of the art biennale worlds of S ão Paulo, Kassel and Kochi? Although these might at first seem like pressing questions, they tended to attract only a tepid interest as lodestars for adjudicators during my stint as a member of the jury for the 2018 Music Theatre Now competition (MTNow).

The question of whether and how opera might be credibly differentiated from music theatre, though a long-standing one in certain ‘scenes’, was not so much directly addressed as left to hover, somewhat unattended.