Exciting ideas are emerging at a time when much face to face activity is on hold. Opera North and the University of Leeds are thinking innovatively about how they can increase public access to learning and creativity.

DARE Thinking With Opera  is a new series of podcasts. Each episode brings together an academic and an opera practitioner in a wide ranging and intimate conversation on a  different theme.

The first episode, Performing Violence, finds leading art historian and 2020 Holberg Prize Laureate Professor Griselda Pollock in conversation with Opera North’s Dominic Gray about representations of violence in painting, sculpture, film and literature; how it is performed in opera, and its implications.

In episode two, The Licence to Misbehave, Professor Alan O’Leary and singer Daniel Norman explore – from Monteverdi to Monty Python – how cross-dressing, gross-out humour and a preoccupation with the grotesque seems to offer a release from the constraints of morality and social conventions.