Petworth Summer Festival 2026

Opening Speech

It is a very great honour to be giving this evening’s address.

After a few false starts in my early 20s my entire working life has been spent in the arts – for seven years at the Arts Council as a funder, just shy of twenty years at the Tate family of galleries getting into hands-on arts management, and for the last 13 years at the Royal Opera House, now Royal Ballet and Opera, leading one of the world’s great arts organisations and a remarkable community of artists and creatives. It has been, and still is a wonderful journey, and I am acutely aware of how lucky I am to have spent my career giving a platform to extraordinarily talented people to shine fresh light into what makes us all tick, through some of the greatest works of art ever made.

We are the story telling species, using all our imaginative and creative capacity to understand our place in the world, the emotions that fuel us and the forces that play on them. The arts are at the heart of our experience, I think they matter, and I think they matter now more than ever.

Why so?

Modern life is riven with division. Digital algorithms slice contemporary discourse into isolated echo chambers, amplifying disagreement without understanding, and reducing complex issues and identities to binary choices. Increasingly people hear voices that reinforce prejudice,

simplify issues and offer naïve sound-bite solutions. Polarisation thrives on this, and it is deeply damaging to our society and collective well-being.

Theatres, concert halls, festivals and opera houses are places where people of all shapes and sizes, beliefs and opinions come together to experience and reflect upon a communal, shared exploration of life. For once, we all look at the same stage, listen to the same notes, and

confront the same stories.

The performing arts in general, and perhaps ballet and opera in particular, represent a radical counterblast to contemporary alienation. They are monumental, visceral, and uncompromisingly physical art forms. They demand sustained attention in a world characterized by distraction.

Through music, movement, poetry, design and narrative, the performing arts address universal emotions. They are not merely entertainment, but a shared space to nurture empathy, explore shared historical memory, and offer a release for individual and collective trauma.

The act of coming together to experience a live performance, sitting in a darkened theatre with hundreds of strangers creates what’s known as a ‘co-present psychological state’ . Unlike watching at home, where one can pause, rewind and fast-forward, or scrolling through a smartphone, the theatre and concert hall demands our focus and attention.

During a performance, our heart rates synchronize with one another and with the rhythm of the music. The collective intake of breath at a dramatic climax or the shared stillness during a quiet solo unites a diverse crowd into a single, breathing organism. This shared physical experience is

the antithesis of digital atomisation.

Opera and Ballet, alongside the other performing arts, are the ultimate human crafts – as far from AI generated, screen mediated slop as it is possible to be. The wondrous ability of a single human throat to launch a column of sound over a full orchestra without electronic assistance,

to bring an audience of several hundred to tears and joy. The intense training and precise bodily control that this involves, as well as exceptional insight and artistry, is a true testament to a lifetime of dedication and craft.

When a singer performs, we share the same breath and feel the same vibrations in the air. It is a deeply connected, democratic experience. In a digital culture dominated by auto-tune, filters, and synthetic manipulation, the operatic voice is hyper-real and amplifies the raw vulnerability

of the performer. The technique, effort, and stamina required to sustain an aria are genuinely awe-inspiring.

Where opera amplifies the voice, ballet articulates the unspoken. It is an art form built entirely on the expressive capacity of the human body, operating within a rigorous grammar of movement developed over centuries.

Verbal language is inherently bounded by geography, culture, and bias. Words carry baggage; they change meaning, and they can be deployed to deceive. Ballet relies on a universal lexicon of gesture, posture, and kinetic energy. A classical arabesque or a contemporary contraction speaks across national and linguistic borders. Where public discourse is often stuck in semantic stalemates, ballet reminds us that beneath our differences, we are all bodies subject to gravity, desire, and pain.

Scientific research into "mirror neurons" shows that when we watch someone perform, our brains activate as if we were performing that movement and gesture ourselves. Ballet exploits this mechanism to its fullest extent.

When we watch a dancer leap across the stage in a grand jeté or spin in a series of fouettés, we feel the suspension of gravity, the tension in the muscles, and the release of energy. This breaks down psychological walls, binds the observer to the physical reality of the performer and, by extension, to the rest of the audience. This collective, shared experience engenders a sense of community and helps us to understand each other.

While watching a performance is deeply affecting, actively participating in singing and dancing together is utterly joyful.

When we sing together, we are joined together. Aside from the shared, regulated breathing and more or less precise vocal coordination, singing releases endorphins and oxytocin, with all the stress-busting benefits that entail. Socially, strangers build trust more rapidly in song than

through conversation alone. In a choir, voices blend to create a sound that no single person can achieve and shows how individuals can contribute to a larger harmony.

Similarly, dancing breaks down physical and social barriers. It requires us to navigate space together, read non-verbal cues, and synchronize movements to a shared pulse. This collective action and energy fosters empathy. When you support someone’s weight in a dance phrase, and

align your movements to the same rhythm you are truly connected and remain so beyond that moment.

We understand our lives through stories. But social media massively over-simplifies, reducing complex experience to tales of goodies and baddies, emojis, likes and shares. At their best the performing arts resist this by embracing emotional nuance, character development and multi-faceted form. Together, and in real time.

To take one example, in opera, different characters often sing different texts and melodic lines simultaneously. In the magnificent final quartet from Verdi’s Rigoletto, Bella figlia dell’amore, characters express opposing motives—jealousy, grief, lust, and innocence at the exact same time. The music holds all these perspectives and mirrors the complexity of life, recognizing that truth is rarely singular or simple.

Most classical operas and ballets deal with extreme emotions, often through intense tragedy: loss, betrayal, madness, and death. By examining these themes, they provide a space for processing grief and trauma. Admitting pain or uncertainty is all too often seen as a weakness

today. On the opera and ballet stage, vulnerability is elevated to an art form. Watching a character face tragedy with dignity helps us process our own unexpressed sorrows. A true catharsis.

All in all, I think theatre and storytelling, opera and ballet included, as well as offering genuinely life affirming experiences, are essential tools for survival in today’s fragmented world. They challenge us to look past screens, move beyond soundbites, and engage with the full depth of

our shared humanity.

Through the acoustic power of the unamplified voice and the universal grammar of physical movement, these art forms build bridges where words alone fail. They call us out of ourselves into a shared space to breathe, feel, and listen together.

By experiencing, supporting and participating in the arts we nurture a vital space for empathy. An emotional fitness centre, where we come together in song and dance, and tell the complex stories that make us human. And the Petworth Arts Festival is one such, hugely important space.

May it and all those here who take part continue to thrive.

And now let’s all sing our hearts out together.

Sir Alex Beard CBE

July 2026