7.1 Introduction: Deep into the Network

Astronomers argue that stars do not exist in isolation: they become part of galaxies, which are further grouped into intergalactic clusters. So do migrants. ‘People migrate in networks’, notes Alejandro Portes (1995). Therefore, they should learn to obtain membership in their networks and to deal with its requirements (ibid). In application to high-skill and elite migrants, the unanswered question is how they manage to sustain their network membership on a daily basis. Seeking to answer it, this chapter studies the dynamics of global elite migrants’ networks, looking into the most challenging experiences that my informants had while navigating global opera networks and into agentic strategies they used to overcome those barriers. Synthesizing theories of ‘migrant network’ and ‘cultural production’ with the testimonies of my informants, I explore their most unpleasant networking problems and associated coping strategies.

To understand how the informants were confronting the most difficult challenges of their own networking, I start with an overview of literatures on migrant networks. This allows me to highlight their main features such as brokerage and other relations that migrants in general and my informants in particular have had with various influential people within their networks. A close attention is paid to the new concept of ‘astrogation’ in reference to the networking of global elite migrants such as my informants.

The analysis of the chapter findings illuminates the work of the informants’ migrant agency in relation to the most desired and undesired networking spaces they respectively sought to enter and to exit. The discussion proceeds to strategies of astrogation that my informants applied to secure their access to or exit from such places. In this connection, I explore the role of sexuality as a factor affecting their astrogation and elaborate such a networking mechanism as ‘sexuality navigation’, while also spotting gender differences in my informants’ experiences of dealing with their elite migrant networks.

7.2 Navigating Elite Migrant Networks: Main Features and Concepts

7.2.1 Becoming a ‘Brown Dwarf’: The Epiphany of a ‘Loser’

Polina, who had eventually dropped from the ‘global elite migrant’ trajectory, explains such career failure in terms of her own inability to find the right people who could help her in the network building process in a timely manner:

I was travelling to Italy on my own to study in a conservatory when I was nineteen years old, without any support or knowledge of how the system works, trailblazing my way through trial and error. Looking back on it now, I admit having made many serious mistakes, mistakes that other – more sophisticated – migrating singers have been spared not to make.

At the age of nineteen, Polina, who had just graduated from a Russian music college in Siberia, wanted to continue her operatic education at a conservatory, dreaming to become an international opera star like Anna Netrebko. Polina did not want to matriculate in a conservatory in Russia. She thought that this route would lead to a modest domestic career trajectory, which she did not want to pursue. Singing in a provincial opera house or converting into vocal teacher in a provincial music college was outside the range of her ‘big starry career’ dreams.

‘Knowing absolutely nothing about the system of operatic education in Italy or Europe’, Polina was mostly listening to her college teachers, who themselves were seemingly not very well familiar with nuances of the global opera industry. However, they persuaded her to explore educational possibilities in Italy. Not understanding precisely where to start, the naïve Polina browsed websites of leading Italian conservatories, which were offering very scarce information online, and applied to the one located in the north of the country because she wanted to be within proximity to the famous La Scala theater. ‘I was so naïve to believe that as soon as I got to Italy, everyone would notice me as a rising opera star’, she says with a sad smile, ‘I thought that, if I studied hard, all best musicians and managers would immediately keep an eye on me and would be eager to work with me’. Her parents, who were even less sophisticated in the world of music, accepted her self-assessment without any questions and agreed to sponsor her education.

In Italy, she was eventually faced with financial losses from attending vocal concourses, taking a lot of recommended private lessons and rotating between various agents and intermediaries ‘in search of a good, worthy place’. Moving in this rhythm, she had managed to sing in a few 3rd and 4th Tier theaters for eight years before she ‘started to feel that there was something wrong about all that’. When the thirty-three-year-old Polina finally met a competent theatrical agent at a vocal contest, she was told that her voice had been broken by the wrong repertoire and that she was not that young to reconfigure her vocal technique. ‘This encounter opened my eyes: it helped me to see very clearly that everything I had done was very wrong’, she confesses, ‘I think I was not destined to meet the right people, and it took me a while to find them; then it was too late because of my age and damaged professional reputation: I was not in-career anymore and no one wanted to deal with a loser’.

7.2.2 The Winner’s Pass, or the Road of a ‘Giant’

‘I did not want to lose my battle for a real career in global opera’, says Rurikh, ‘I had been dreaming about becoming an opera singer since childhood, and I knew that I should not lose it’. His mother was a flutist in the municipal philharmonic orchestra, and under her influence, Rurikh ‘fell in love with classic music and opera in the early days’ of his life.

In high school, he was preparing for the conservatory located in his hometown to study opera singing. For almost two years, he was taking voice lessons from a private tutor and ‘advisory tips’ from his older friends who were already enrolled in that conservatory. Four months before the prom, he heard from one of them ‘a sad career story’, which later became their hometown legend in resonance with Polina’s case. The story was about a woman singer who had graduated from his prospective conservatory a few years prior and with whom he had mutual friends among local musicians. His mother, who also knew her, noted that their “unlucky home-towner was not destined to make a brilliant career in Italy because she had not known how and where to seek help”.

“How was she supposed to know what kind of help she needed when she had never seen the real world beyond opera”, exclaimed Rurikh’s less bohemian father, who was a lawyer. These words led Rurikh to think, for the first time in his life, about the seriousness of his choice and to postpone his application to the conservatory. He had been persuaded by his father “to consider a variety of routes—not to abandon the whole “stellar opera” idea but to begin with a more realistic and pragmatic step”. ‘I suddenly realized how fragile my professional position would be because I had absolutely no resources to attract influential people and because I did not yet know which specific people to attract’, says Rurikh:

How could a teen know how to connect to powerful and profit-oriented older people in an entirely new world? In those days, I did not know many things about the complex relations between adults. Neither did I possess any specific skills that I could offer them so they would like to support me. This is what my father was trying to explain to me by saying, “Become somebody real first and only then try to explore the unstable world of music in a faraway land. Only after you become economically independent, you will be able to structure your own life, connecting to the right people. It will save you a lot of career time, which is always precious”.

Following this advice, Rurikh matriculated in the local university, from which he graduated five years later with the BA degree in business and economics. Having accumulated knowledge about running business and managing people and having saved some money from his internships, he came to Italy to study opera singing at the age of twenty-two. During his studies in an Italian conservatory, he was taking side jobs in a local firm and expanding his circle of business partners. From conversations with his teachers, he knew that opera projects in Italy and Europe were largely sponsored by private funds. He realized that, as soon as he could find businesspeople with an interest in sponsoring opera shows, he would be able to offer such contacts as a valid asset to future theatrical agents.

Like all new singers, he was actively participating in vocal contests and social parties for artists, at which he was sharing his investment plans with various stakeholders. This is how he found his first agent, who made him ‘a very good deal of job contracts’. Rurikh continued to bridge his connections in business and opera for some time until he found his number three agent, one of the best agents in Europe, and thus established himself in the global opera industry.

The mastered skill of bridging social ties in business with those in art has actually allowed Rurikh to evaluate the emerging geopolitical situation correctly. Looking into how the business in their small firm (where he was employed part-time during his conservatory studies) was responding to new initiatives and new collaborative projects with bigger firms, Rurikh came to understand that the best time to establish oneself in any global business would be during a satellite collision between a smaller firm and a bigger firm. Such satellite (minor) collisions were described in Chap. 4. For example, he picked a role in a smaller theater in Europe to sing in their co-production with a Tier-1 theater. ‘It was a modest role’, he says, ‘but my participation in their satellite production enabled my entrance to Tier-1’. Singing this role, he became part of that Tier-1 theater’s network of producers and agents, one of whom was his agent number three. ‘I was offered a couple of contracts for the role of this caliber in different Tier-2 theaters’, as he further explains the logic behind his decision, ‘However, the other theaters did not have such mutual projects’. Rurikh admits that he first engaged in some investigatory work trying to understand the theater’s mission and future plans before he chose this particular contract. He thus believes that the best time for making an effort to enter the Tier-1 galaxy is during its satellite collision with a smaller theater, even if this theater may not be well known.

These two illuminative stories (Polina versus Rurikh) show once again that migrating opera singers trod their paths into the global opera industry in different ways and with different outcomes. Some become an international success, while others drop from this stream and start viewing their own career as a failure. No wonder, as migration scholars will say, because ‘people should migrate in networks’ (Portes, 1995: 5). This famous, cliché-like statement means that the cornerstone and the main driving force of any migration process is the network of relations that migrants build with various people who may somehow impact upon their migration—the driving force that came to be very weak in Polina’s case. In fact, she herself admits that she had no relations with powerful people who were controlling the global opera industry at the time of her aspirational accession: she thus had no membership in a network that would enable her migrant agency.

Polina’s story of elite career failure is the story of her migrant network failure. Her tragedy is that she was never a network member in a sense of benefiting from this ‘aggregate of all social connections assisting migration’ and embodied in what scholars conceptualize as the ‘migrant network’ (Garip, 2008: 591). She was never a beneficiary of this compound support system that, as Krissman (2005) notes, brings together other migrant-support mechanisms such as kinship (family) networks, personal (friendship) networks, workplace (occupational) networks and hometown networks.

On the contrary, the career success of Rurikh is directly attributed to his capacity for envisioning and, consequently, mobilizing various career steering mechanisms on the international scale. Listening to his friends’ testimonies and following his father’s advice, he used those small segments of his family- and friendship- networks at origin as the first-step resource to develop a more independent form of professional networking later in Italy. This highly strategic approach had enabled Rurikh’s sophisticated mixed-method networking into the global opera industry and had turned him into a sophisticated astrogator and a successful global elite migrant. As noted by Krissman (2005), such diverse resources for collecting information and connecting with people are assembled into migrant network by unique constellations of actors in unique configurations for each individual migrant.

One of the founders of the migrant network theory Alejandro Portes (1995) further argues that migrant networks must be viewed from the intersecting perspectives of multiplexity, reachability and asymmetry. (This standpoint is very close to how astronomers view celestial galaxies and spaces of star formation.) The ‘multiplexity’ of migrant networks—or their multi-dimensionality—is illuminated by a diverse range of people with different social statuses constituting such networks and by their multi-faceted connections with other networks that extend across the globe (ibid). In this connection, Rurikh has been able to understand how this multiplexity should work. With the startup help from his family member, he came to see that important contacts must be operationalized both at origin and in other places relevant to the main goal of his migration, thus enabling his transnational career at different ends. He came to see that all networking resources were intrinsically interconnected, although they were housed by different galaxies. From the very beginning, he started to recognize and to utilize this interdependence of information and contacts that were important for his future migration and astrogation, the relational complexity and dynamics that Polina was never able even to spot because she was not a proactive astronaut.

It is also important to remember that the goals of global elite migrants are often more challenging that those of migrants from other migration streams. Their elite career aspirations are usually translated into more precise, more ambitious and more uncompromising goals compared with the amorphous and fluid dimensions of the ‘good life’ that is frequently desired by other migrant groups. These goals of migration are the people’s career- and identity- ‘boons’—the highest prices they eventually receive for their ambitious and risky migratory journeys (Triandafyllidou et al., 2023). The higher the migrants’ aspirations rise, the more restrictive their networks become, thresholding their way to high-stake career goals: as noted by Manuel Castells (2000), high status and elite positions are offered for free neither to local people nor especially to newcomers in any society. When preparing their own access to a new highly protective network, migrants should, therefore, think very carefully about two main questions of strategic importance: which people to target as contacts and how to connect to them.

7.2.3 Who Is Who: Nodes, Brokers, Intermediaries

Access to global elite employment is always controlled by transnational networks and their most powerful actors, known as ‘network nodes’ (Castells, 2000). In the global opera industry, their list includes high-level producers, theater directors, artistic directors and orchestra conductors. Located in the network nucleus, they decide which singers to hire. It is the proximity to these influential network actors that ambitious migrant-artists should seek. While networks, in their turn, carefully hide their own nodes from the outsider (ibid; Zhang et al., 2021). Network closure is a main feature of global arts industries, which promote elite careers, shape public tastes and generate high revenues on the transnational scale (Lee, 2021; Petersen, 2017; Walter, 2016). This means that transnationally oriented opera singers cannot manage their network entrance on their own.

To enable their network access, singers normally use services of an opera agent, who plays the ‘broker’ role by introducing them to opera houses and by mediating their relations with employers (Harrington, 2020; Isaakyan, 2022). A professional agent may represent an established operatic agency or run his/her own enterprise (Walter, 2016). Scholars of arts note that finding an agent who can secure desired transnational employment for a migrating artist is usually a phasal process, involving more than one intermediary (Lee, 2021; Walter, 2016). An intermediary is a lower-level dispatcher of artistic talent, who enables the artist’s access to a broker by introducing them to each other or by providing information to the singer on how to reach a desired agent.

7.2.4 Network Ties: The Complexity of Human Relations

As all my informants admit, looking for brokers or intermediaries within a global artistic network is a challenging activity, which requires an understanding of and an ability to navigate the whole space of existing social ties by the migrant-artist. In terms of how migrants can connect to desired network actors, the interpersonal relations that underpin such contacts are often very diverse and complex, ranging from familiar and easily accessible people to complete strangers (Granovetter, 1973; Keskiner et al., 2022). These relations can be grouped into two basic agentic strategies for network contacts: ‘family strategy’ and ‘independent strategy’ (DeLuca & Ambrosini, 2019)

Migrants often ask for help through the ‘strong ties’ with people they personally know such as family members, close friends, (former) colleagues and teachers, or friends’ friends (Granovetter, 1973). All such familiar contacts can be united under the umbrella of ‘family’, embracing people who care about the migrant and become a reliable source of support for him/her (DeLuca & Ambrosini, 2019; Xiong & Li, 2021). Although these ties can be quite helpful as the ‘first aid’ networking tools, they are not always sufficient for reaching farther goals such as elite position or access to an influential person from the network nucleus (ibid; Krissman, 2005). Unfortunately, strong ties do not always lead the migrant directly to the node or to the right broker and may result in ‘useless contacts and wasted time’, as my informants note. Almost 90% of them (50 people) were from the very beginning of their journeys using friends, colleagues and relatives as initial contacts for their transnational careers. However, only for 15 interviewed singers (25% of my sample), those contacts proved to be the most effective, which happened when the informant knew the agent as a relative or friend.

In fact, the ‘family’ strategy of strong ties may fail to help the migrant see all the complexity and many important nuances of the social world around him/her (Granovetter, 1973; DeLuca & Ambrosini, 2019). While caring about the migrant, his/her relatives and friends from the country of origin may know everything about the reality of global migrations and transnational careers. The parents of Polina, who sincerely wanted her to succeed in life, knew nothing about the global opera industry and could, therefore, provide very limited support for her career development. Given this, ambitious migrants may choose the ‘independent strategy’ of networking (DeLuca & Ambrosini, 2019), investing in ‘weak ties’, ‘small-world ties’ and/or ‘latent ties’, which all use unknown people as the main networking resource.

For the majority of my interviewees, the most effective tool for enabling the entrance to a desired network was through a more distant connection. Scholars note that migrants often use ‘weak ties’ with more distant people whom they do not know (Granovetter, 1973). Reaching out to such people is an agentic process, during which the migrant creates new links between oneself and a previously unfamiliar network actor (Granovetter, 1973; Krissman, 2005; Neff et al., 2005).

The dynamics of migrant networks, however, crosses the boundaries of such bipolar oppositions as ‘friends’ v. ‘strangers’. The frequently made contacts through ‘small-world ties’ and ‘latent ties’ are indeed more complex in their logistics. They are based on the convertibility of ‘weak ties’ into ‘strong ties’—that is, on the ‘stranger-friend’ conversion—by exploring and using the common space that the migrant can share with initially unfamiliar distant people. This common space may be quite real, resembling the ‘small world’ of studying in the same college or living in the same town during different time periods in the past. In this reference, scholars recognize the power of ‘small-world ties’, or contacts with strangers who come from your socio-cultural background (Granovetter, 1973). A small-world stranger is a network actor whom you may not personally know before your encounter but who comes from the same ‘small world’ such as your native town, the university where you completed your undergraduate education, or your previous workplace. Alternatively, within this time-space compression of the ‘small world’, you may develop a new tie to an old friend of your close friend, using such third-party friendship as a mutual socio-cultural background for the network entrance (ibid; Keskiner et al., 2022).

However, when a desired shared space is found in a lived experience, the migrant may create it by exploring possibilities of mutual interests with a targeted stranger. Migrants benefit by the herein constructed ‘latent ties’, or ties that are based on shared interest rather than on prior acquaintance (Haythornthwaite, 2002: 384). In this connection, there are many networking hubs for discovering and activating ‘latent ties’, including various Internet platforms, social parties and professional concourses. Vocal contests and off-work parties, in particular, give artists a unique opportunity to discuss future collaborative work with potential agents and employers (Neff et al., 2005). In the global opera industry, sponsors and agents may initially follow the artist’s work online (through digital recordings) prior to a real life encounter at a vocal competition or in an artistic agency (Harrington, 2020; Hartley, 2021). Vice versa, migrating singers may wish to study online profiles of operatic agencies and influential musicians before choosing to participate in a particular vocal contest that such latent contacts are invited to judge or to attend (ibid). Making latent ties is, in fact, a much more difficult strategic activity than it may seem at first sight, and its underestimation may lead to a networking failure.

My forty informants admit that, at a certain stage of their career progression, they were looking for an agent through the Internet, exploring opinions of other (often personally unknown) singer-users while also exchanging emails with the pre-selected agent and forwarding audio-records to him/her. Ten out of them seem content with such a choice while the rest feel unhappy about these latent ties. ‘In the Internet, opera singers often tell each other lies about their personal experiences’, notes Polina, ‘because they are afraid of the professional competition. That is why, you have to be super-cautious when reading other users’ opinions online. You need to support this information with something else, something much more reliable than web search’. Polina further admits that she was ‘once completely fooled by fabulous online reviews on a frequently advertised opera agent, who proved to be incompetent in reality’. She confesses being naïve and inexperienced with other networking tools to verify this information.

It can be fairly assumed that the best independent strategies of network building are those based on planning and preparation. On its own, the independent strategy of connecting to distant people does not, however, always suffice to enable the migrant’s access to a desired elite network: like in Polina’s case, the prospective contacts may have been pre-selected falsely by the migrant. In this connection, DeLuca and Ambrosini (2019) note the ‘mixed’ strategic approach that skilled migrants can use if they have a ‘strong tie’ contact who can introduce them to a reliable distant person. This means that migrants should combine their old and new resources to achieve desired ambitious goals.

Given this, more distant ties are worth investing but through a strategic mix, such as services of privately recommended competent brokers who connect migrants to top list employers and other network nodes by directly introducing the former to the latter and/or by providing migrants with updated information. As Polina’s epiphany illuminates, intermediaries recommended through strong ties are no less important, especially in the management of latent ties and in the avoidance of their traps: ‘I wish you had met a knowledgeable and trustworthy person who would have told me: “Go here, and do not go there”.’ My other informant Pafnutiy also came across similarly misleading information about an agent. However, he was advised by a reputable musician, who was their family friend, to avoid this networking trap:

I was graduating from an Italian vocal academy at the age of twenty-five and looking for an agent when my cohort fellows advised me on exploring a specific website. It looked intriguing. The follow-up telephone talk was promising and engaging. However, my parents told me, through a Skype conversation, that I should be very careful about possible scam. My dad is not a musician. He is a doctor who knows little about opera. But he asked one of his patients who happened to be a leading pianist with transnational connections. He checked on the post, asked his colleagues and confirmed it was rubbish. I had almost signed the contract with that agency. This is where any competent advice from a reliable source is important.

‘Lucky him’, exclaims Polina, sharing with me her colleague’s similar experience. With a note of sadness in her trembling voice, she adds a minute later, ‘Unfortunately, there was no one in my life who could explain to me whom to trust and whom to avoid’.

7.3 The Way to a Stellar Nursery

Whom to trust and whom to avoid, which places to enter and which to pass by or, at least, to escape from as soon as possible before it is too late…Those were the most difficult decisions to make for the majority of my informants.

7.3.1 Elite Network Spaces and Their Rewards

The nature of ties that bind the migrant to other actors within his/her network points to such its feature as directionality: network ties can be reciprocal or asymmetric (Xiong & Li, 2021; Zhang et al., 2021). Reciprocal, or symmetric, network relations can be understood in terms of rewards that the network offers to its worthy members for their services. While relational asymmetry takes place when a network imposes obligations upon its member and punishes him/her for a misconduct (Portes, 1995; Krissman, 2005). Through the prism of their relational dynamics, the global elite networks of migrating opera singers can be divided into desired spaces with symmetric relations, which can be conceptualized as ‘stellar nurseries’ and ‘white holes’; and undesired spaces with asymmetric relations, which can be viewed as ‘black holes’.

In astronomic terms, a stellar nursery is a segment of space where stars are made (Prialnik, 2000). Metaphorically speaking, a stellar nursery is an academic institution or a workplace where elite professionals are trained to the “star performance” finesse. In application to migrating opera singers, a stellar nursery can be a conservatory, a vocal academy or an elite theater where special facilities for the training of elite musicians are offered on a daily basis, including such resources as high-rank vocal coaches, elite coach-pianists and world leading orchestra conductors.

It has been already illuminated in the previous chapters that a stellar nursery is not a one-time event but a serial phenomenon in the life of a global elite singer. To graduate from an elite conservatory or vocal academy it not enough to stay on the global elite level: the singer must be continuously included in global elite training through his/her employment, in order to keep her/his voice and technique in a good shape. From this perspective, stellar nursery can be understood as the first desirable outcome of astrogation and as a network segment that is intrinsically connected to other networks of elite employment, such as those described in Chap. 5. In other words, physical sites and networks of elite employment for transnational opera singers are those that contain stellar nurseries in their spatial architecture, and astrogation as such is actually the navigation through a series of stellar nurseries.

As also described in Chap. 5, a network that is similar in its configurations and closely located to a stellar nursery is what I would like to conceptualize as the ‘white hole’. This heuristic device has been borrowed from astronomy too in application to the most desired elite professional space that is very hard for newcomers to join but easy to leave for those who hold its membership. It is difficult to be entered because it provides direct access to the best training facilities and, consequently, fosters a rapid career growth. For example, an A-level theater usually has a regular training program for new artists and the best pianists and vocal coaches for established singers. In some cases, a stellar nursery may gradually lead to a white hole and become part of it. For example, the majority of leading A-level opera houses have a special training program for aspiring singers such as a two-year academy. Their graduates often join the workforce either of the patronizing theater or of other no less prestigious theaters. The ‘stellar nursery—white hole’ nexus is present in the logistics of many 1st layer theaters, which were described in Chap. 3.

These ‘stellar nursery’ sites and their networks can, in fact, open wide doors to many elite galaxies because various forms of human capital accumulated there (new virtuoso professional skills and new relations with the most influential nodes) become valued everywhere in the world. Therefore, such resources are always carefully protected from outsiders, leading to high network entrance fees. All my informants used to dream about enrolment in elite Italian conservatories and employment in elite European theaters. However, ‘only dreaming about physical proximity to such places is not enough because they are extremely closed’, says Polina. For example, 30% of my informants studied in the Conservatory of Milan, with no one from my sample having found employment in La Scala.

The illuminative cases of Polina and Rurikh show, as supported by all my informants, that the first problematic issue for them was how to locate an operatic stellar nursery and/or a white hole and enter it in a timely manner.

7.3.2 Stellar Staircase

‘Your road to best opera houses is paved by your agents—you cannot do it on your own very quickly if not at all’, says Pafnutiy. In this connection, scholars generally argue that, since nodes of migrant networks are not always within easy reach, migrants often approach them through brokers (Portes, 1995; Zhang et al., 2021), which is the rule of thumb in the global opera industry (Harrington, 2020; Isaakyan, 2022). However, many brokers who can straightforwardly connect migrants to nodes are not directly reachable either, which leads to asymmetric relations between migrants and nodal hierarchies (Krissman, 2005; Xiong & Li, 2021; Zhang et al., 2021).

My informants often contacted their theatrical agents through lower-level intermediaries. Those intermediaries were literally dispatching the informants to the targeted brokers in multiple phases. In many cases, the informant had been re-dispatched among various intermediaries, including their colleagues and associates, until (if at all) s/he finally reached the intended agent. Not listed in any professional directory, those “invisible” intermediaries were found by my informants through personal connections. They were positioned on different layers of the operatic industry, and, since an artist could often pass from one intermediary to another, their network resembled a staircase.

The relational asymmetry of such stellar stairs can be illuminated by the informants’ application for network membership. As generally noted by scholars of migration studies, newcomers are usually required to pay some entrance fee for their network membership (Krissman, 2005; Xiong & Li, 2021; Zhang et al., 2021). Either at origin or destination, the fees that those intermediaries collected from my informants for their network access included monetary bribes and sex work. The first intermediary was usually a friend of a friend who worked as a waiter or a cleaner in a prestigious theater or opera company. Having received payment from the informant, this person dispatched him/her to a higher-level facilitator such as artistic managing assistant or low-level pianist, who then dispatched the informant further to the broker. An intermediary could demand a half-year salary from the informant’s previous job, a smuggling operation or a sexual favor to himself (for men-intermediaries) or to an associate. A woman could also be a very harsh and sanctioning intermediary.

As Zoe recalls her multi-phasal broker search in Italy:

I was looking for someone who could introduce me to someone who could be somehow connected to that agency: friends, their friends or people who were working in there, including even the cleaners in the theater that was connected to that company. I was searching for such a person for months until I found a cleaner who introduced me to her boyfriend who was the assistant of the orchestra conductor. That guy promised that he would connect me to the chief conductor himself, who was a close friend of a good agent. But instead that cleaner kept introducing me to various ordinary musicians, and each of them was complaining about not having enough power in their theater because of not having been represented by a good agent. I had spent almost two years rotating between them and responding to their needs before I eventually met a very competent agent. He happened to be the cousin of a college friend of a pianist whom I was then dating and to whom I had been introduced by one of those cleaners.

My other female informant shares a similar series of events that happened to her in Russia:

The mother of my boyfriend was a conservatory teacher. That is why I started dating that guy. Otherwise, I would not have come even close to him. She was telling me all the time that she was a close friend of that world famous conductor and his agent and even showed me their picture together in which all three of them were much younger. She kept promising that she would introduce me to one of them next month. Eventually I figured out that she had not been in touch with them for more than fifteen years and that she was one of the many for them. Then I started asking other people who were introducing me to other people. So I eventually abandoned that idea of being introduced to that particular maestro or his agent. They were both like fantoms, who existed somewhere nearby but you would never reach him. I felt like I was being non-stop climbing somewhere.

7.3.3 The Patron

Cleaner, boyfriend pianist, friend’s cousin…‘The wrong strategy!’, sarcastically laughs Sviatogor, ‘All you need is voice and sponsor. Get noticed by an influential musician or producer, make a very strong relationship with this sponsor, and the rest will go easily: no cleaners, no somebody’s cousins, no wasted resources.’ As he further clarifies, the good voice means an excellent vocal technique, which is trained in stellar nurseries and with the help of right people but the aspiring singer does not necessarily have to obtain this skill in advance, before contacting an agent. ‘The sponsor, who sees something in you—a glowing spark of talent or something else, will advise you on where specifically you can improve your skill’, explains Sviatogor. He himself admits not being very lucky to get the appropriate education in his country of origin: ‘I always had a very big voice but not enough agility in it’. When he enrolled in a vocal academy in Italy as his post-graduate education, he could not improve his technique either: ‘It is very difficult to find a good voice teacher because each voice is very unique and fragile’.

During his second year in Italy, Sviatogor was dating a famous singer whom he had met at a schmoozing party and who introduced him to her agent. As he now recalls his encounter with that agent, ‘He told me that I had an excellent instrument—my voice—but not enough technique and directed me to a very good vocal coach who was specifically training singers with my type of voice. I would not have been able to reach such a teacher on my own’. Sviatogor adds that the agent had been persuaded by his girlfriend to invest in Sviatogor’s education, ‘He gave me this chance to work on my technique only because she had vouched for me. She had a lot of influence’.

He and other informants admit that, in fact, the overall space of operatic brokerage has been very stratified, so it was really problematic to find the ‘right broker’ who could become ‘the golden mine’ for a migrating opera singer. Sviatogor has managed to make this important contact through the ‘family’ strategy, by using his significant other. His story proves that the stellar staircase to the ‘golden mine agent’ may have an additional, winding top-down step. This happens in cases when the migrating singer reaches a network node who stands at the top and who becomes the sponsor (or personal referee) of his/her talent, referring him/her to a best agent at a step below. The singer thus reaches his/her ‘golden mine agent’ through the personal top-down reference from the sponsor, who becomes his/her patron.

The ‘privileged intermediary’ such as girl/boyfriend, who was located a step higher than a targeted agent, was usually a leading pianist, a renowned musician, an artistic manager or a close friend of the broker, of a theater director or of the leading conductor. It is important to remember that such people as leading transnational conductor or leading entrepreneur from 1st layer global theaters can play the role equivalent to that of broker as they have all connections within the global opera industry.

Impacting upon the informants’ education and stellar nursery access, the patrons were also able to significantly modify many other networking conditions for their protegees. The patron could negotiate the employment contracts of his/her protegee either with the agent or even with some of the suggested theaters. The patron could also help to change or terminate some of the network sanctions such as workload or repertoire choice. Above that, the patron’s reference letter or informal phone call could open many doors to the protegee such as a prize at a prestigious vocal context or enrolment in a prestigious training program.

The informants who have chosen to share about their patrons confess having intimate relations with those people over a long period of time. Some of such protegees now perceive themselves as being ‘duped’ and ‘exploited’ because the powerful hand of artistic patronage may work in the other direction too (which will be discussed in a later section of this chapter). While others recall their patrons with gratitude and say that they were literally ‘blessed to come across such a star-maker’. Looking back on their careers as fueled by their patrons, some informants truly consider themselves ‘the luckiest people in the world’.

7.3.4 Wormholes

Was it really their good luck or sophisticated calculations? Their testimonies show that, in many cases, the operatic patron was encountered at a social party or a vocal contest:

I remember singing with mistakes, which made me very upset. I knew that I would probably not get into the finals. I saw him among the jury and thought that he would probably not even remember about me after that contest. But after I had been informed that I was not shortlisted, he came to me in the cafeteria and said that he was very much impressed by my voice and artistic skills. He said that I should work on my technique and that he would be able to help me.

The informant notes that she politely rejected the offer, which was then made to another female contestant and was immediately accepted. As argued by Hakim (2011) in reference with this kind of network dynamics, good-looking young females always have an opportunity to attract powerful nodes, especially through off-work parties. Yet given the no less frequent rejections of such offers, the actual ‘weak tie—strong tie’ conversion that underpins potential relations of this kind is always an agentic process (ibid).

The work of the informants’ agency in seeking this mode of elite networking is illuminated by their own endeavors to reach sponsors of this caliber, who were, in fact, not always easily contacted. Getting in touch with them could be a horny path, resembling the ‘broker staircase’:

For more than a year, I had to cow-tow to various mediocre musicians, including pianists, other singers and even technical staff in one very famous opera house. I kept introducing myself to their friends and relatives, begging them to bring me to that maestro. I was eventually introduced to him. A very nice man indeed, he listened to my singing with much respect and recommended me to a very good theatrical agent. But all those miserable guys who had been using me as if I had been nothing, just a piece of flesh. I had been actually digging my golden mine for more than a year.

‘There is always a faster way to get there, by investing in a bit of bodily work’, cynically notes my other informant. There were, in fact, quicker ways to look for a sponsor, which resemble what astronomers and physicists call ‘wormhole’. As described in astronomy and science fiction, a wormhole is ‘a space-time tunnel’ that opens for those who want to travel over a large space in a short period of time (Schutz, 2003; Visser, 1996). Astronomers compare it with the route followed by a worm who travels from the top to the bottom of an apple by eating the path through the apple’s core instead of moving over its diameter from the outside (Smith, 2004). Although wormholes mostly belong to the realm of science fiction, some astronomers honestly believe in these space-time shortcuts and hope to scientifically prove their existence one day (Schutz, 2003). At the same time, physicists issue a warning that a wormhole itself has a rather instable structure: even if it is discovered, it will be a temporary opportunity, eventually leading to a black hole (Schutz, 2003). However, if appropriately chosen, a wormhole can open a wide door to larger galaxies (ibid; Visser, 1996). Looking for a wormhole can be viewed, therefore, as a time-consuming process with often uncontrollable yet not always fruitless outcomes. These astronomy basics suggest that those who are committed to finding a wormhole to the opera patron and, consequently, to the global elite career should be very well prepared for this migratory journey, planning its every step.

The interviewees’ testimonies point to the following five ‘wormhole scenarios’ of reaching out to a top-down intermediary. Some informants from the former Soviet Caucasus and Middle Asia confess that their contacts with elite intermediaries, brokers and even global operatic nodes were initiated through their elite musical, entrepreneurial and/or policy-making families. Musical dynasticism has been narrated by these informants as a leading factor of their exquisite operatic brokerage, liberating them from such challenging payoff activities as making a sexual favor or ‘giving the last saved money’ to the broker or intermediary—and thus offering ‘the most benign path toward global opera’. The ‘family’ factor has created a distinct scenario of top-down brokerage—Scenario 1—in which the informant’s affluent partner or parents might engage in the entrepreneurial alliance with an elite intermediary or even with the broker himself (as described in Chap. 3). In this connection, scholars of cultural studies note that the majority of middle-level cultural and musical entrepreneurs have limited or even null economic capital, even in spite of their political influence (Neff et al., 2005). They are always keen therefore on forming a business partnership with leading businesses and/or investors who could sponsor their cultural projects (ibid). Among my informants, there are a few women whose husbands have invested generously in their cultural projects and, therefore, in their connections with future brokers (see also Chap. 3):

It was actually my husband, the General Director in a very dynamic business company who was once approached by a leading musical entrepreneur in the EU. That entrepreneur happened to be a close friend of my husband’s overseas business partner. In fact, the company that my husband was working for was located in my country of origin and had many strong international connections all over the world. At the time of contacting my husband, that person was launching an ambitious operatic project during an incoming international music festival, and he did not have enough money to finalize the project. He was therefore looking for an investor who could be a relative to an aspiring soprano – this is how he found my husband. My husband generously invested in his project under the condition that I would be the leading part of it. As a result, the project came to be of superb quality (with all those special effects and supplementary ballet elements) and received the first prize at that festival. I was eventually promoted further because everyone knew that I could be an excellent investment.

Patrons were also reached through the informants’ conservatories both at destination and at origin, illuminating Scenario 2. In this career script, vocal teachers and pianists could recommended the informant to a sponsor, without, however, guaranteeing the outcome of the networking. Zina recalls being introduced by her Italian teacher to a famous orchestra conductor, who, during their first private rehearsal, suddenly grasped her breasts and ‘wet kissed’ her. When she complained to her referee about this, the referee said very calmly, “I did not know that you are so sensitive. If you are so sensitive, you are mostly likely not ready to work with a conductor of this caliber”. ‘She was not at all surprised to hear about his behavior’, says Zina, ‘But she was really surprised to see my negative reaction. She said that they were actually helping me, given that I did not have any family ties in opera’.

The informants who did not have influential family members or mentors could follow Scenario 3, meeting and impressing brokers and network nodes at artistic socialization parties. Half of my informants have met their influential transnational agents at such parties in Moscow and St Petersburgh: ‘You have to frequent such parties if you have not been born in the right family’. Scholars confirm that all ambitious professionals in industries of global cultural production are expected to engage in so-called ‘compulsory networking’ (Neff et al., 2005: 321). When thinking about elite transnational careers for cultural industry workers such as models, painters, dancers and musicians, scholars of arts recognize the decisive factor of career ‘schmoozing’ (ibid). This mode of professional socialization imposes fluid boundaries between ‘work time’ and ‘play-time’ while 25% of this compulsory networking for artists is shaped by so-called ‘compulsory schmoozing’ (ibid). It is mostly through participation in bohemian parties and various social events that artists initiate their ‘patron’ contacts, which become pivotal for their transnational careers (Barley & Kunda, 2004; Epstein et al., 1999). Such compulsory schmoozing presupposes investment in sexual favors in exchange for career promotion (Neff et al., 2005).

For artists, the majority of ‘patron’ or ‘broker’ -contacts take place exactly through such socializing events as banquets, beneficiary or thematic parties, famous musicians’ anniversaries or bohemian club gatherings (Neff et al., 2005). Those events have taken almost 50% of my informants’ job-searching and career-building time. Regardless of how demanding those activities were, no informant has doubted their important role in providing wormhole access to patronage and brokerage.

Influential contacts were, however, also made through more formal channels of inter-collegiate communication such as vocal concourse, following Scenario 4. In fact, international vocal contests function as wormholes for aspiring transnationally oriented singers toward their future patrons and brokers. Influential agents, conductors and opera-house directors are often part of the contest committee. However, the shortlisting of applicants is a difficult procedure because it is, in many cases, entirely based on online pre-selection and online evaluation of compact discs: ‘In order to have the compact disc with your audio record examined and evaluated, you have to personally know someone in the committee, which is normally done through schmoozing at a party months before the contest; and, like elsewhere in Europe, the opera circles in Moscow and St Petersburg do throw such transnational parties year around’.

It is important to note that Scenarios 2–4 did not always offer predictable routes to brokerage: everything was still dependent on the singer’s personal survival skills of being able to respond quickly to a new encounter and to convert a weak tie into a strong one. Part of this conversion could be sexual favors and other forms of bribing.

Avoiding such risks was sometimes possible through Scenario 5, related to making business connections with various stakeholders within the opera industry—the route to patronage that was followed by the interviewed men-artists. Rurikh’s case shows that the mix of agentic strategies can make the wormhole larger as an entrance gate to new networks. As astronomers note, a wormhole always has the tunnel, a short pathway through which the object moves toward a desired destination; and the mouth, a larger opening at the end of the shortcut tunnel through which the object exits into a new space (Thorne, 1994; Sparke & Gallagher, 2000; Waller & Hodge, 2003). The larger the mouth of the wormhole—the better the opportunities for the object to be accepted by a new galaxy or even by more than one galaxy (ibid). Appropriate calculations of the wormhole mouth that are recommended by physicists in this connection (ibid) can be compared with migrant agency, which is based on the elaboration and choice of agentic strategies for networking to enable not only a faster way toward an ambitious career goal but also an easier way of being accepted by new networks.

Within this context, one of the agentic strategies to enlarge the wormhole mouth was investing in non-operatic education before becoming a global elite migrant. That strategy of networking acted like a magnet, later attracting many other strategies such as new friendships, new business partnerships, mutual cross-sectorial projects in opera and advertising business, new marriages and sponsors with money. For example, almost all my male informants have their vocal education in a conservatory as their second education. All twenty interviewed men-singers first received their BA degree in their countries of origin in economics, business or law before enrolling in a conservatory either at origin or in Italy. This factor has allowed them to draw sponsors and agents in faster ways and avoiding long intermediary staircases.

Compared to that, only five of my forty female informants hold their first BA outside the domain of music: three women have their first degrees in foreign languages and two in economics or engineering at origin. This is mostly related to the long-standing gender differences in the work of human agency and consequent cultural constraints at origin within the overall post-Soviet space of career building. Moreover, none of these five women has been able to implement a strategic mix in the design of their prospective wormholes. None of them has made use of their pre-emigratory non-operatic degree in an elitist occupational domain as a tool for future migrant networking. None of them has made use of this unique and rich array of networking resources as a global elite migrant.

On the contrary, my male informants note that, from the very beginning, they did not want to be humiliated by sex work or deception in their search for patrons. ‘This should be well thought in advance’, says Pafnutiy:

We, men, are not valid on the sex market, which is open mostly for women. Therefore, we should take care of ourselves and invest entirely in professional business. This is what makes the real man’s world, and this is what actually allows us to negotiate our way into the global opera industry in a man-to-man dialogue.

Practices of this ‘man-to-man dialogue’ dismantle, to a certain extent, the prevailing façade of feminization as the public face of global elite migrations in opera. On the one hand, the majority of leading and secondary roles, which attract foreign talent, are mostly performed by women singers, who, consequently migrate more often than their male colleagues. However, the way migrating opera singers manage to take control over their elite careers at destination points to women’s agentic vulnerability, which has deep historical and cultural roots such as the narrated ‘brave men’s world of business’ and a relatively weak support of career-oriented women by their own families. My above-noted five women-interviewees with additional degrees started to use their non-operatic education as an agentic tool for wider integration only after their global elite careers had been over, about which I will write more in the next chapter.

7.4 Black Holes

7.4.1 A Star That Is Stretched to Die

On top of the above-noted problems with network access, the relational asymmetry of migrant networks manifests itself in the lack of power that migrants may have negotiating conditions of their employment (Haythornthwaite, 2002; Xiong & Li, 2021). In some cases, obligations and sanctions imposed by elite migrant networks are so severe and the debts to pay are so high (ibid) that the network dynamics can be compared with what astronomers view as the ‘black hole’, the opposite to the ‘white hole’ (Dickinson, 2004).

Throughout their global elite careers, my informants experienced two types of such ‘black hole’ networking traps, from which they found it almost impossible to escape: pre-entrance (pre-elite) blackhole; and white black hole. The pre-entrance black holes emerged during the informants’ long passages of rotating inbetween intermediaries and waiting for their chance along the long routes to what had initially appeared to be a wormhole. Such black holes were associated with ‘hanging somewhere in-between and being continuously stretched as a person and a professional, both physically and emotionally’. The informants found it hard to leave that kind of relationship mostly because of their own false expectations that were supported by the intermediaries’ lies and their own naivety as the main obstacle to their migrant agency.

However, a more challenging black hole was observed after the actual network membership had been initiated. Upon the entrance to a desired network, the informant had to comply with such obligations as sexual favors to various stakeholders, singing wrong repertoire for commercial purposes, engaging in artistic innovations and difficulties with work-life balance (including pregnancy for women).

In this connection, the factor of cultural production became the main contributor to the imposed obligations. The network of cultural production could have an unspoken pact with the sponsor limiting the informant’s availability on the market and insisting on his/her singing an unsuitable repertoire for commercial purposes. The informants confess that sometimes they could come across opera business dealers who cared much less about music and the singer’s health than about short-term lucrative projects: ‘They insisted on me singing such repertoire that would destroy my voice, and when I eventually found a good broker, I was completely without voice’.

Another ‘black hole’ factor related to the overall commercialization of global opera was the fact of artistic innovation. Scholars of arts argue that, in order to compete with pop art, all high arts must promote artistic innovation, with emphasis on new cultural forms that would bridge high and popular culture (Godart & Mears, 2008). In fact, today the western spectator wants to see a mix of artistic finesse and sex on stage (ibid). Within this context of extreme commercialization, my informants were requested by their nodes to perform specific acts of bodily work on stage including undressing and enactment of sex and assault. Some of my informants (both women and men) confess that they were made to perform scenes of violence or to openly put off their underwear on stage ‘to make it look more realistic’:

I had simultaneously to sing a very difficult coloratura aria and to put off my panties. That was the plan developed by our artistic director. I was doing it many-many times during all our rehearsals and performances. I remember feeling so embarrassed and dirty for a long time, and it was very difficult to sing to the best of my vocal ability at those challenging moments because I was shivering, almost on the verge of tears, and could not breathe properly. It was very difficult to sing nicely in such a state of mind. I remember crying on stage and begging to stop when it first happened during our first rehearsal. But I was told, “If you are so sensitive, maybe this job is not for you. What’s the big deal? You are not being really abused. No one is touching you physically. It is just a game. Pretend you are enjoying it”.

As noted by Adorno and Horkheimer (2002/1944) in relation to such contexts of cultural production, the human body per se becomes not only a tradable form of capital but also an object for exploitation. For example, five women-informants complain about being pressed by their agents to sing on stage while being pregnant or to rapidly lose the after-labor weight for a specific role, despite the doctor’s advice not to do so. All women admit that they were openly suggested by their networks to try intimate relations with various network actors for the purposes of promotion.

Although these problems can be experienced by all ambitious opera singers, regardless of their nationality, they were their impact was the most challenging for immigrants like my informants because they were often sequestered from family support and left on their own in a foreign country. Many of them did not understand for a long time what was actually going on because the previously desired network (white hole) had dramatically changed its dynamics toward them, becoming one big trap—a white blackhole.

7.4.2 One Big Hole: Problems with Exit

Exiting from such relations was not easy. The sanctioned informants felt ‘sucked’ because their node was an influential actor in other networks. The node could have the inter-galactic influence beyond his/her black hole. For example, a very famous artistic director of the ‘new singers’ training program in a prestigious opera house usually had many small-world ties with various other prestigious theaters and opera companies. The informant who was trying to exit the black hole created by such a node was running a very high risk of not being employed anywhere for a long time:

When I told my agent that I wanted to ignore my patron’s demands, the agent explained to me that all theaters that had been pre-arranged for me as a “contracts deal” would inevitably ask for the patron’s letter of reference. The agent also said, “Having worked with this person for some time, you cannot go anywhere without his references. It is a small world”.

The agent thus made it clear for the informant that any strong, weak or latent tie that she would like to use in her future networking would be immediately converted into a negative small-world tie with her current patron: recognizing which training program she comes from, any potential employer will have a negative impression of her as a worker. It was the unilateral convertibility of ties that kept the informants within their black holes.

Another explanation for their black hole membership can be the reciprocity between black holes and white holes. As noted by astronomers, a white hole is a reversed black hole (Smith, 2004). The informants often say that they did not themselves know that they were entering a black hole. They were often seeking membership in a good and reputable place, which eventually happened to be ‘an ominous trap’. The informants who were ‘in-career’, in many cases, had to deal not with ‘good’ or ‘bad’ networks per se but with a ‘white’ black hole—a highly elite and desired network with many stellar nursery resources, which unexpectedly started to impose severe and long-lasting obligations. While suffering from injustice and hardships in such a place, the informants, nevertheless, confess benefiting from its elitist training and other career building tools such as exquisite parties and access to small-world elite contests and agents. Some informants who used to work under the crude control of a specific node now recall him/her as a sex trafficker and a bad person. While others from the same network honestly praise him/her as their godfather or godmother.

When it still happened, the informants’ exit from their black hole could take place in two ways. The informant could exit without any tension when, having received some favors and loyalty from him/her, the black hole started to transform into the promised white hole, offering many doors to other places. Half of my informants admit having experienced this metamorphosis in networking. In other cases, the informant either eventually left the global opera career or found another agent or patron.

As the interviewed men note, it is always better to try not to fall into a black hole rather than seek exit post factum. They stress the importance of predicting how a prospective network would behave and what sanctions to expect. This is what Rurikh’s father meant by saying that a young singer should be well-prepared for global migration.

Part of this preparation is a clear understanding of how ‘good brokerage’ should work. Good transnational brokerage in global opera is understood by my informants in terms of informational transparency and agentic flexibility, meaning the singer’s minimum commitment to stay with the network but his/her maximum ability to negotiate its access and exit. Having learned by their own mistakes or by the mistakes of others, the informants see a good dealer as ‘the one who can explain very clearly how the whole procedure works, what role he/she is playing in it, what the migrating artist is asked to do (what kind of payment or favor) and what should be expected as an outcome of each specific step and how soon’. As added by my ‘in-career’ male informant:

If something goes wrong, you should have enough freedom to leave this business relationship as soon as possible. This should be agreed upon from the very beginning of your communication with the agent or whoever brings you to him/her. If you have no choice in negotiating your freedom, this means that you are dealing with a bad broker.

He further adds that a desired democratic relationship with a broker or a node can be easily achieved through additional business contacts outside opera, which may not be available for everyone.

7.5 Sexuality Navigation

7.5.1 Stretched But Tolerant

My female informants admit that, once they moved with their transnational careers overseas, they were afraid, more than anything else, to leave Italy and the global operatic industry because of the inability to find the right agent. They admit having been ‘ready for any means’ and having ‘reconsidered their previously naïve moral values’. At the same time, they disapprove the idea of investing in sexual favors without ‘being adequately paid’:

I met a man who was a close friend of the chair of a prestigious international concourse. He promised to ask the chair to promote me to finalist. I agreed to date him just two times (as discussed beforehand) and ended up not even among the semi-finalists.

The adverse effect of such failed brokerage was often narrated in terms of ‘wasted time’. The reported career benefits, which often overweighed the black hole hardships, and the informants’ consequent eagerness to ‘invest in intimate relations for profit’ point to a high degree of tolerance to sex work in the global opera industry. ‘Investing in a bit of bodily work’…It is within this context of the ‘black hole’ normalization and limited career resources for women migrants that the interviewees’ sexuality has become a feminized agentic category, enabling their access to networks and resources. Malheiros and Padilla (2015: 688) define the sexuality of highly skilled women-migrants as their ‘ability to use body as capital in intimate relationships—that is, as a key asset’ for career-making. Migrants’ sexuality is their ability to ‘synthesize intimacy and social ties in meaningful and strategic ways’, further adds Kosnick (2016). As Luba argues, ‘Many people outside opera criticize stars for their promiscuity. I personally think that, if it works, if it can help you to be in-career, why not use it? I used it many times when needed’.

Luba has, in fact, generously invested in her own sexuality, having placed it at the top of her list of astrogation strategies. Like other female informants, she admits having sexual partners among nodes and patrons until she eventually found her future husband (also a network node) through such schmoozing activities and married him. On the same note, her younger and less experienced co-national Grusha feels very sad about her lack of skill to convert sexuality into an astrogation tool, ‘Everyone I know seems good at making this. Why cannot I make such friends? I am trying really hard but influential men do not notice me. This is not fair! I probably need to learn how to use my own body more effectively’.

The agentic difference between these two determined network actors lies in their navigating skill: one is a proficient sexuality navigator while the other is the beginner level. Their stories prove what Malheiros and Padilla (2015) observe about this agentic practice as often used by ambitious women migrants from cultural industries.

It is within this context of pragmatic decision-making that I conceptualize sexuality navigation as migrants’ actual use of intimate corporeal relations specifically for the purposes of exploring a social network and establishing and controlling one’s membership in it. While navigating their networks, the informants were employing their own sexuality as an agentic practice and a networking mechanism grounded in the convertibility of intimacy (as a form of symbolic capital) into the most powerful form of social capital such as long-term networking.

7.5.2 Nodal Marriage—An Inter-Galactic Cart Blanche

In some cases, their sexuality navigation could foster only temporary, although still powerful, contacts with patrons as an additional step in their stellar staircase. While in others, it led to the ultimate form of capital conversion – the nodal marriage, through which weak nodal ties were converted into strong family ties on the permanent basis. For my informants, it became the most effective strategy to enter a white hole, to exit from a black hole or to obtain some freedom in negotiations over their employment and migratory conditions. By ‘nodal marriage’, I mean the migrant-artist’s marriage to a network node such as orchestra conductor, more famous pianist or colleague singer, artistic manager or theatrical director.

Highly desired, such matrimonial cases were not very numerous, however. Only fifteen women and two men have been married to their transnational network nodes. An interesting fact is that these women are mostly married to Italian nodes while the men were using more transnational connections: they have been married to their fellow students from South Korea and Argentina who come from musical dynasties. Both men are employed in leading theaters within those regions (Asia and America).

Despite their initial enchantment with the rampant myth that women-migrants can easily arrange their careers through marriage, my female informants do not think so anymore. ‘It is not easy because male patrons are very picky and spoiled partners. They are high maintenance’, notes Snejana:

It is easier to marry a famous bi-sexual musician who wants to have a family and children rather than a straight man who is famous in global opera. Influential straight men are all lady-killers, playing with the minds of their female colleagues and fans and changing girlfriends every week.

Disappointed with her previous traditional relationships, Snejana started dating a homosexual orchestra conductor, ‘If he asked me, I would marry him tomorrow. Conductors are all well-connected and homosexuals are much kinder and much more humane’.

Angela also confesses having a long-term relationship with an influential bi-sexual man, ‘He wants to have a child and I want to stay in Italy. We have not been married because he is not sure yet about us staying together’. All interviewed women who are involved with such bi-sexual men confirm their wish for a mixed-orientation family.

Lana feels lucky to have met a nice bi-sexual colleague at the difficult moment in her life when her job contracts were expiring and her traditional relationship stopped working. Her ex-boyfriend, who had been promising to finalize his on-going separation with his wife, had eventually returned to his Italian family. Lana was ‘feeling helpless’ until she met a bi-sexual colleague at a new rehearsal and married him three months later. ‘He wanted to have a family and I wanted to be in-career. I knew he had dynastic connections in the world of music’, says Lana, ‘And it has worked very well: we are both happy now’. Through this marriage, Lana has been enacting Scenario 1 of her transnational employment (see Chap. 3), rotating between 1st- and 2nd- layer theaters in Europe; while they also grow a child together. ‘I do not have to worry about pleasing all these intermediaries anymore’, concludes Lana.

As an astrogation strategy, the nodal marriage has a strong symbolic power: it is not only a well calculated conversion of ambitious career goals into pragmatic ties but also a preservation of old beliefs without significant risk to the new relations. For example, the singer may see that her old morale (such as fidelity and love) does not work within her prospective network because the network is demanding sex for profit. If the singer abstains from compromising her morale, she will run risk of being sanctioned by the network. On the contrary, the symbolic system embodied in nodal marriage does not conflict with the symbolic system of the singer, who is not obliged anymore ‘to sleep around on every staircase’. As noted by my node-wedded informant, ‘Even if you say no, the network will still accept you because of your “husband” shield’.

In terms of the network dynamics, the nodal marriage enables fast access to stellar nursery resources. My female informants admit that the ‘nodal marriage’ strategy has not only protected them from sexual harassment and other risks of global elite migration. Nodal marriage has also given them a voucher to more exquisite and privileged networks. They had suddenly stepped into a privileged caste within their networks. This agentic potential for women’s independent networking is especially evident in their mixed-orientation partnerships because of the rising homosexual lobbying in high arts globally (Ross, 2017; Salazar, 2018; Woolfe, 2019).

It is the Mixed-Orientation Marriage through which Lana has found her happiness both as singer and woman and which has become a shared experience of my four other female informants. This type of matrimony is also known in literatures on sexuality under the official terminological abbreviation of ‘MOM’, denoting ‘a marriage between partners of differing sexual orientations’ (Buxton, 2001). Although there have been some studies on MOM’s positive influence on women’s sexuality dynamics (Buxton, 2001, 2004; Ross, 1999), nothing is known about this form of spousal partnership as a factor of international migration because the latter has been for a long time viewed in migration literatures as ‘isolated from sexuality’ (Cantú et al., 2009).

On a small scale but my research illuminates, with the case of five migrant-artists, the general argument across social sciences about MOM as an emancipating experience for women (Buxton, 2001, 2004; Ross, 1999). The five interviewed women with the MOM-based transnational family pattern perceive themselves as powerful planners of their own lives and careers, who have found, with maximum precision, both the right man and the right network contact in one person. They see their mode of matrimony as more beneficial than the nodal marriage grounded in traditional sexual orientations.

Compared to MOM, the nodal marriage of the interviewed female singers to straight male colleagues and patrons was reported as more asymmetrically skewed toward the husband as the sole ‘provider’ of the ‘in-career’ benefits to his immigrant wife. (Chapter 6 will further show nuances of family integration within such households.) At the same time, the narrated MOM experiences have given the interviewed women more personal and professional freedom because these woman believe that they themselves have become the ‘givers’: the woman has provided her homosexual husband with something precious that he could not easily get previously—a traditional family, which is still an important political element in the prevailing traditional ethno-sexual scripts of the global opera industry (as discussed in Chap. 4).

From the other end, this form of matrimony also dismantles the historically traditional public view on the role of homosexual men in global migrations, who are often discursively imagined as vulnerable sexual minorities with a lack of agency to control and to change the whole migrant network (Cantú et al., 2009; Carrillo, 2004; Manalansan, 2006). The narrated MOM experiences have empowered the bi-sexual husbands of my informants too: these men have become the nodes of their wives’ migrant networks. The herein shaping MOM-based migrant network resembles a young galaxy that is opening before the informant. Emerging from weak ties, it is an example of their conversion into very strong ties leading to the creation of an alternative family pattern. MOM synthesizes the traditional format of migrant network such as ‘family’ with the innovative network such as ‘novel alliance’ of people who were discursively constructed as incompatible.

7.6 The Silence of the Men

The narrated ‘black hole’ spatiality, from which my female informants sought protection through marriage and other forms of sexuality navigation, may make them look vulnerable as global elite migrants, pointing to the feminization of sanctions within their networks. A gendered experience, the ‘woman’s black hole’, however, has deep socio-economic roots.Footnote 1 The interviewed women themselves admit that they were actually never encouraged by their families at origin to make business ties on equal terms with men and to use these contacts as a powerful resource for future migrant networking and elite career building. Prior to their global migrations, the majority of the interviewed women were never given a chance to prepare their migrant agency, thus never using the ‘family strategy’ for networking to the fullest. The only available career-making tool within this gendered context, their sexuality navigation was also supported by the globally expanding ethno-sexual scripts of opera diva’s sexuality (as earlier explained in Chap. 4).

Is there also a black hole for man? ‘Yes, there is’, notes Pafnutiy, ‘But we, men, do not like to share’. ‘If you start asking men about what you were asking me, they will say that this does not apply to them ’, explains my female informant Marfa, as supported by all my female informants:

Male colleagues from my country of origin and other post-Soviet republics will never tell you that they had to have sex with influential people. For example, there may be a famous homosexual patron who never does anything for free: you have to be a gay man to be supported by him. And he has promoted a couple of my guy-friends, who are not gay. Of course, they both say that they have been promoted because of their talent. Men never share details like this. They envy us, saying that it is natural for us to sleep with a patron.

‘For a woman it is always much easier’, notes Tikhomir, ‘The majority of sponsors are men. It is not as challenging as it would be if she were not female’.

‘Men also suffer from this’, says Zina. She further explains that her male colleagues also engaged in sexuality navigation, experiencing a disruption of their sexual identity as an outcome, ‘I have a close friend who did this, and he was feeling very broken psychologically. A high price to pay’.

A price to pay…On a summative note, the informants’ testimonies prove that astrogation can be costly. The price was set for their ‘white hole’ access, ‘black hole’ exit and services of a broker to enable their network membership and/or to terminate pending sanctions. As for their agentic strategies, the interviewed men confronted these issues mostly through investing in business relations while the interviewed women through sexuality navigation. The interviews show that it was difficult for an aspiring migrant-artist, especially for a woman, to be ‘in-career’ without having a patron. Patronage became a frequent agentic tool, although with the Janus-faced effect.

A new patron could indeed enable the direct contact with a competent agent or other nodes, protect from previous sponsor pacts and additional sexuality navigation, and enable the exit from the black hole and the entrance to a new white hole. In some cases, the patron himself did, however, eventually become a black hole node, imposing new obligations on the informant and creating asymmetric networking relations. This resonates with the argument that white holes can be found mostly in science fiction. What initially appeared to be a white hole for my informants could actually develop into a black hole later. As noted by astronomers, black holes work differently for different stars: some of them get stretched while others still manage to survive and proliferate in a black hole (Thorne, 1994).

The informants’ stories lead to see a specific migrant network, which can be defined as a ‘white black hole’, in reference to a visibly symmetric (or democratic) elitist space that eventually turns into sanctioning and restrictive. In some cases, a ‘white black hole’ could be a clearly asymmetric network within which some members still managed to progress in their elite careers. As Munschi (2014) argues, ‘caste clusters’ can be found within many migrant networks. Some informants truly believe that the solution may be not in the avoidance of a blackhole but in the ability to learn how to adjust to its gravity. This is perhaps another angle to look at migrant agency and networking.

Such ‘white black hole’ spaces with very fluid social ties point to the contextuality of symmetry within elite migrant networks: the same load of sex work was felt as empowering by some interviewees while stigmatizing by others, which is especially seen in the women’s testimonies.

‘It is, in fact, not easy to be a migrant woman in global opera’, concludes Zoe, ‘We are not like locals, who use their family ties. All on our own, we have to work with legs’.

‘It is not easy to be a migrant man in global opera either’, argues Matvei, ‘Sex is not an option. We have to work with brains’.

‘It is very hard to be a homosexual either’, adds another interviewed man, ‘You have to tell lies about yourself, pretending to be who you are not’.

‘Legs, brains, faked identities’…To put it softly, they are talking about the sexuality navigation for women, the immigrant entrepreneurship for men and…the conspiracy for gay people? This is where our discussion is leading to a wider problem area. Global elite migrants’ integration is what this book will be looking into in its next chapter.