On 22 November 2017, the world of opera was shell-shocked by the death of the supergiant star Dmitry Hvorostovsky, a famous Russian baritone who died of cancer. His death was not a surprise because he had been terminally ill for a long time. However, the fact of his ‘sudden non-being’ in the world of opera appeared as a shock to all who loved it. My informants were no exception. Most of them had been lucky to attend his performances in Europe and to hear his unrivalled charming voice. ‘It feels like he is still here, still alive’, noted Zosya, ‘I think artists like him never die. They continue to shine even post mortem. Their glory is immortal. Will I ever reach this kind of fame and eternity?’ I did not respond to this question, which I guess was rhetorical—or maybe not. Maybe Zosya truly wanted to hear what a sociologist might think about her career potential. I softly switched the topic because I did not want to disappoint her. To be honest, I did not believe in her futuristic starry career, although miracles can, of course, happen. The reason I am so skeptical about Zosya’s future is that she and her idol Hvorostovsky are the two extra-polar types of global elite migrant.

They are absolutely different from each other as professionals and migrants not merely because she is a younger generation of post-Soviet migrant woman, who started her migratory journey several years ago; and he was an older generation of post-Soviet migrant man, a pioneer of global elite migrations, who had initiated his global work in the 1990s. The late Hvorostovsky was a global opera supergiant, employed exclusively by A-level theaters, well-integrated in Europe and in Russia (both in his native town of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and in Moscow or St Petersburg). Although the beginning of his career had been as modest as that of my many informants. His second wife Florence, who is originally from Switzerland, can be called a ‘privileged national feeling at home anywhere in Europe’ (Favell, 2008). She had become his personal conduit to the European culture and to the global elite work. She had been his personal impresario, meticulously planning and synchronizing the spaces of professionalism, daily life and family building within the overall pattern of his initially problematic integration.

On the contrary, Zosya was always alone in her ‘global elite migration’ project, professionally confused, having no reliable agent or any other robust source of professional support, and jumping from one gig job to another. She was unable to synthesize the resources available back home with those at destination. She had no network of her own. How could I tell her that to me she appeared disintegrated and that her elite labor migrant career was obviously finished? How could I tell her so bluntly that she was seemingly a failed star? This was not what she wanted to hear. And I lied to her.

9.1 The Ontogenesis of Migrant Agency—A Celestial Journey

When we think about labor migrants—and especially about global elite migrants as a specific category of labor migration—we must think about their work and career development as deeply intertwined with their migration histories. They are not just ‘professionals’ or ‘elite professionals’. They are elite professionals who become migrants and often shape as prospective migrants from the very beginning of their working lives. They are also migrants who seek to grow professionally throughout their migration and transnational work. And in terms of their integration, they may, in fact, remain migrants for a long time even after their naturalization. We must, therefore, not look into the dynamics of their work and migratory trajectory as separate. We should think about these two ontological developments as intrinsically interconnected. Otherwise, there is a high risk of simplifying the concept of ‘elite migrant’, the important part of which is this epistemological interconnectivity. Elite migrants become global elite professionals only through migration, and their global migration is always driven by their professional goals.

It is the concept of migrant agency that captures the epistemological reciprocity between transnational work and transnational lifestyle. Thus migrant agency is not only about geographical relocation and cultural readjustment. In relation to labor migrants, it is also about their professional development within a transnational social space. It is a dynamic symbiosis of their career and migration -projects.

‘Transnational social spaces’ are defined by Thomas Faist (1998: 2016) as ‘combinations of social and symbolic ties and positions in networks that can be found across geographically and internationally distinct’ localities. Transnational social spaces encompass multiple interlocking networks of social relations and also cultural values and symbolic elements that underpin these relations (Lubbers et al., 2020).

As noted by Guarnizo (1997: 281), global migrations ‘forge a dense web’ of multifaceted transnational relations that unites transnational migrants ‘in a continuous transnational social formation’. This spatiality is illuminated by the multidirectional mobility and ‘exchanges of material and intangible resources’ between various countries (ibid). Scholars recognize that the herein emerging networks of relations and values underpin the formation of a migrant category. The accent is placed on networking relations, which convey more social and cultural activities than merely connecting to the right people. The networking of migrants inevitably involves their dissemination and negotiation of cultural values (Lubbers et al., 2020).

The ‘celestial outer space’, metaphorically reconstructed in this book, reflects the nature of the transnational social space of elite migrant-artists and involves specific group-unique scenarios of their transnational work-and-mobility. While their metaphorically conceptualized migrant agency as ‘astrogation’ conveys the idea of exploring the relational dynamics within this uneasy and labyrinth-like networking space. The relational and spatial architecture of elite migrant networks is indeed so complex and interactive that they can be compared with celestial galaxies, and also with inter-galactic collisions and mergers if we think about the factor of geopolitics underpinning their dynamics.

Thinking about how they have become global elite migrants, we need to look into how their migrant agency was developing in its intersections with their transnational work, or into the ontogenesis of their dreams and decisions about being an international opera who lives outside the country of origin and performs worldwide. Table 9.1 below summarizes this dynamic.

Table 9.1 Dynamics of Opera singers’ migrant agency
Full size table

This is not just the dynamics of their career—this is the formation of their elite migrant agency, undergoing the phases of ‘nebula’ (foggy/amorphous migrant agency, dreaming about but unable to envision details of one’s migration), ‘protostar’ (baby-star/infantile agency, accumulating social capital by trial-and-error and sometimes achieving transnational employment in low-level theaters), ‘young star’ (young/developing migrant agency, searching for stellar nurseries and enabling the artist to somehow stay afloat in the global opera space yet with the minimal degree of progress) and ‘red giant’ (‘main-sequence’, or maturing, elite migrant agency, with astrogation toward elite A/B-level theaters and creation of small stellar nurseries worldwide).

These phases do not reflect the development of operatic professionalism but mostly relate to the evolution of the global elite migrant: in fact, they are associated with the attributes of global elite migration rather than the operatic profession per se: transnational networking, participation in international concourses and international workshops, schmoozing parties on the global level, looking for specific ‘global’ agents who are part of transnational networks, and elite temporariness (or ‘black hole’ temporariness). For example, these attributes of elite migrant agency cannot be found among many post-Soviet opera singers (like the former cohort fellows and parents of some of my informants) who have permanent jobs in modest and even relatively famous theaters at origin and never consider the project of migration. From the very beginning of their career, they might know what skills are required by the domestic job market and have these static skills developed rather early in their artistic lives. And the services of domestic broker-vernaculizers are never used by these artists (who do not even consider themselves as the elite) but by people like my informants, who need specific support in navigating their way toward influential transnational producers.

The ‘main-sequence’, or ‘red giant’ phase of the elite migrant agency refers to the ‘global star’ career as such, or to the ‘established elite migrant’ status. They become giants through their ‘elite mobility’. Although the continuum of this phase can be rather broad, embracing singers who can be viewed as ‘low-mass stars’ (or ‘modest giants’) and ‘mid-size stars’ (or ‘average giants’), who are mostly employed by B-level theaters across Europe—and also the real ‘red dwarf’ (or ‘red giant’ as such) employed in A- (and sometimes B-) level theaters globally. The majority of my informant were modest or average giants at the moment of the interview. The most essential features of their work and lifestyle include the absence of permanent employment (which obviously contradicts the idea of elitism) and incessant geographic mobility (which is not always freely chosen by dictated by the galaxy).

9.2 Black Hole as a Transnational Social Space

The majority of my informants have reached the ‘modest giant’ phase in their elite migrant agency. Associated with mobility and temporariness, their lifestyle of the ‘modest’ global elite can be also conceptualized as the ‘black hole membership’. The ‘black hole’ is the sociological metaphor created in this book in reference with the networking space of global elite migrants. It is actually the sociological metaphor for their transnational social space. However, it can be also probably found in other transnational social spaces or working environments. Sociologically speaking, the black hole is associated with network obligations that are difficult to envision and understand, especially during the early learning phases of migrant agency such as nebula, baby-star and young star. These obligations and sanction are so diverse because they are generated by various transnationally placed network actors that the elite migrant feels as if ‘stretched from various directions’. Given its invisibility, the black hole often camouflages itself as a democratic place of elite professionalism, which is akin to the celestial ‘white hole’—an imaginary (science fiction) space where the majority of elite migrants want to be but which spaceships have not yet managed to find.

Another important feature of the black hole spatiality is that it is not as difficult to enter as to leave. It may be, in fact, hard yet quite realistic to enter because, although invisible, it can still be detected through the support from various people who act as the ‘black hole navigators’. It happens because the black hole as a spatiality is meant to magnetize and to trap as many objects as possible. Although hidden from the naked eye, its gates, therefore, remain open for the entrance. However, the black hole trajectory is a one-way movement. Black holes are indeed extremely difficult to exit because their architecture does not just entrap the person. The spatiality of a black hole literally ‘sucks’ him/her and not only through its sanctions but mostly through the continuous promise of an upper goal, associated with professional and spiritual rebirth as ‘world-famous artist’ in our case.

The interviews show that ‘becoming stretched while looking for the black hole exit’ may create the perception of the ‘thinning of life’ in elite migrant-artists, which is illuminated by their integration. In fact, their elite migrant network controls everything in their lives. It monitors and blocks even their everyday social integration because integration is a tool to build up a new network—that is, to leave the existing black hole. In this way their network safeguards its black hole exit. Italy has a specific local community culture, which is very vibrant with local events—the culture of Italian opera and soccer. The majority of local communal events center around soccer and opera. Parents get together with their kids at communal festivities dedicated to soccer, where there may be also invited singers. This is a cultural hub where it is possible to meet the mother of a broker or a soccer loving director of a small theater who may be the relative of some parent from your child’s school. This is an autonomous small but very vibrant galaxy where wormholes to various other—bigger—galaxies can be easily found. This is the space where the everyday integration provides the bridge to professional integration and new professional networks.

At the same time, the space of socio-cultural integration requests the physical presence of a migrant-artist: the informants admit that, in order to benefit from their integration, they have to regularly participate in local events together with their children and their children’s parents, which is often not possible because of their eternal mobility. Obstructing their everyday integration through mundane mobility, their elite network actually obstructs their professional integration, one of the proxies for which is network building capacity.

Another labor market integration proxy that is also controlled and adversely affected by their elite network is their income. The wages they get are actually much lower even than the net amount after taxes: as highly visible elite professionals, they must pay out of the pocket for the additional services of an expensive hairdresser, ballroom instructor, dressmaker, private otolaryngologist and even individual vocal coach. The higher the professional level, the higher such expenses: ‘as an elite migrant-artist, you must look good and healthy’. The informants note that the requirement to be good-looking, slim, athletic, sexy, super-mobile and overloaded with work is especially acute in relation to opera singers who are migrant-women from the former Soviet bloc—the ‘road paved by Netrebko’, as they further joke.

These black holes are also isomorphic and resilient to geopolitical changes: when one of the black hole creators or segments disappears, the black hole itself may remain firmly in place, as it has been recently illuminated by the elimination of Valeriy Gergiev from the global opera network. The elite migrant’s black hole is thus difficult if not impossible to destroy.

My interviews show that my informants started to enter their life-time black holes mostly during the ‘low-mass star’ phase. Although we can even find the first steps toward the black hole entrance even in some ‘young star’ cases. The spatiality of the global opera black hole is so polymorphic that it contains different actors from different world regions and a new black hole stakeholder can enter this space at any moment. For example, one of my female informants complains on an influential musician with whom she crossed the path when she was a conservatory student in ger country of origin. He who was persistently blocking her way toward international career and good brokers: he was always expecting sexual favors from her, which she was refusing to offer.

After she had eventually managed to find a good European agent through an international concourse participation and had worked in Europe for four years, this person from her past started to adversely affect her growth even at a distance. She was offered a new long-waited contract with an A-level theater when the theatrical director happened to know her homeland nemesis. Having looked into her resume, the director asked this person for the reference.

The informants note that such black hole expansions happen all the time as ‘a nasty person from your past can come into the network play when you least expect it’. As a result, this woman had to resign from the ‘maturing red dwarf’ (elite migrant artist) positioning to the invisible ‘brown dwarf’ (vocal coach). As astronomers say, brown dwarves are often impressive planets with rich resources but never luminous stars (Troup et al., 2016; Raddick, 2016; Plait, 2019; Huston, 2021).

9.3 The Black Hole Agency

The majority of studies on migrants’ constrained agency, or agency restricted by their networks, speak about the positively constrained agency—or the migrants’ ability to use available resources to make a constrained but still a desired action (Bourdieu, 1986; Giddens, 1984; Sewell, 1992; Gulati & Srivastava, 2014; Jordhus-Lier & Coe, 2023). An example of such positively constrained agency is the pre-migratory life of the French artist Paul Gauging (who eventually became an elite migrant). When he was employed as a stockbroker in Paris, he could not paint every day for hours. His busy working schedule made this technically impossible. However, he managed to take painting classes in the evenings and paint during weekends in secret. Thus his agency as an artist was limited but still associated with doing something that he always liked. This was contrary to his agency as a stockbroker, which was enforced upon him by his Parisian business network and which he was not able eventually to sustain because it was not associated with a desired upper goal. However, when he became a migrant-artist in middle age, his migrant agency included many challenging activities—such as travelling as a low paid sailor, living on various exotic islands in the conditions of precarity and even dying from the herein acquired lepro in extreme poverty in Tahiti—all for the sake of shaping as a super-giant international artist. His life shows that an elite migrant-artist may exercise the hybrid agency, which consists of several different parts.

In fact, what happens when the elite migrant has to deal with the network obligations that s/he finds difficult to sustain? This kind of migrant agency that covers the person’s behaviors that s/he normally finds repulsive and unacceptable (before migration) but engages in under the network pressure can be understood as ‘enforced agency’. This includes Gauging’s determination to live and die in the anti-sanitary conditions in the Pacific Rim as well as my informants’ decision to accept high workloads and frequent traveling in spite of the pregnancy or to engage in sexuality navigation.

The ‘black hole agency’ is the agency that takes place in the conditions of being stretched between the ‘moral good’ and the ‘profitable evil’, or having no way out other than surrender to the self-sacrifice with the purpose to fit the network expectations. The ‘black hole agency’ is a type of such enforced agency, or negatively constrained agency, that, as illuminated by my informants, normalizes the network-required moral misconduct for the sake of the upper goal (such as international elite career, or the global elite migrant status). The undisclosed information about the black hole nuances has been part of the informants’ culture of lies and conspiracy, part of their ‘elite migrant artist’ culture, part not shared with wider audiences. At the very beginning of their migratory journeys, their migrant agency was foggy and unprepared for this self-sacrifice.

The structural trap of the migrant’s black hole generally resonates with the logic of what Ndomo and Lillie (2022) conceptualize as the ‘toad pool’ migrant culture. They compare the network-integration attempts of a skilled migrant with the movements of a toad who has fallen into a deep water pool of varied temperature (ibid). According to the African legend, a baby toad, who has reached the middle of the water pool cannot swim back to the surface because his body has already become incompatible with the temperature in the upper layers of the pool. At the same time, he finds it hard to continue swimming down toward the bottom of the pool because his body temperature has not yet adjusted to the temperature of the lower layers either. He, therefore, remains trapped somewhere in the middle, unable to move. On analogy, Ndomo and Lillie (2022) refer to migrants as trapped somewhere in the middle of the pool of integration and transnational networks: for them, it is impossible to return yet extremely hard to move forward. Still they try to go forward, although at a slow pace, and their migration journey remains unfinished (ibid).

This ominous middle segment of the toad pool can be compared with what astronomers call the ‘event horizon’ in a black hole, or ‘the point of no return’ (Begelman & Martin, 2021), after having reached which, one cannot move other than forward, toward the final upper goal.

My informants reached their migratory ‘event horizons’ mostly during their ‘young star’ years. This phase in their lives was facilitated by their financial investments, parental pressure and networking dynamics. For example, Natasha reached the event horizon of her elite migration after she had sold her inherited apartment in Russia and had invested all her savings in her relocation project, ‘When I was leaving Russia for Italy, I knew I had nowhere to return’. Serafima had reached her point of no return when her parents told her that they had invested 80% of their family business back home into her overseas education and professional training:

They told me in very plain words that the family money had been almost gone and that they themselves were divorcing. They were trying to tell me that I had to manage on my own, They were repeating that, after all that family sacrifice, I was obliged to make a brilliant career in international opera by aby means. This is how I realized that it was the point of no return for me.

Another interviewed woman understood that she was crossing her event horizon after she had met an influential patron in Europe: ‘He was helping me a lot, although I did not like everything I had to do. But he was so powerful and so connected to some powerful people back home that, even if I had decided to quit and repatriate, I would have not been able to find any operatic job anywhere in the former Soviet region. This is when I came to see that there was no way back’.

This event horizon was their mental point of no return, which was, however, different from a ground-breaking identity change invoked by a biographic turning point. Crossing the migratory event horizon was their finalization of the epiphanic passage caused by the turning point that had happened earlier. For example, Natasha’s turning point was her separation with the partner before matriculated in the conservatory. As a result of this separation, she decided to become an international opera singer and moved to a bigger Russian city and later to Italy for elite operatic education. The sale of her apartment technically enabled her prospective relocation to Italy and became the finalizing moment (the act of “burning the bridges”) in the life change that had been actually facilitated by the change in her previous intimate relations.

However, the ‘black hole’ trap of elite migration is much more complicated than the existential condition of ‘cosmic no return’ or ‘toad pool’ immobility because of its intrinsic ambivalence, or the subjectivity of its perception by elite migrants. Some of my informants were actually able to move forward very fast after they had crossed the event horizon within their elite migrant networks. Even their coming back is, in fact, possible in physical terms. They themselves admit that they can indeed repatriate or stay in Italy but without elite employment. And this decision would mean the end of their desired goal. The migrants’ ‘black hole’ trap can be thus explained in terms of their ‘social-mobility- upon exit’.

In this connection, we can look into the black hole condition that can be found among illegal migrants, who are existentially stretched by smuggler networks and a desire for a better life. And if the illegal migrant somehow manages to exit this black hole, she may end up with upward social mobility such as legal status or decent job at destination. Deshingkar (2023: 605) observes the analogous tendency among ‘debt-migrants’ in India’s construction sector, ‘trapped in forced labour and perpetual indebtedness’. Still many of those who manage to leave this black hole of migration end up ‘buying land, investing in farming, releasing themselves from moneylenders’ and thus moving up to a good life, in terms of their social status (ibid).

On the contrary, a global elite migrant who exits the black hole ends up with downward social mobility such as a less elite job at destination or the unprestigious status of returnee. The migrant’s perception of his/her own social mobility trajectory is often very subjective and related to his/her identity work (Isaakyan et al., 2022). And this is how ‘black hole’ identities of elite migrants may shape, as also supported by public opinions and media narratives.

On the level of mass consciousness, various legends and fairy tales describe the hero who engages in a migratory project in search of his destiny (like my interviewees) as diving into the ‘belly of the whale’ and coming back healthy and ‘reborn’ as a noble prince, which becomes his ‘identity boon’ (Campbell, 1991, 2008[1949]). This is how ordinary people, including my informants when they were the ‘nebula’ and ‘baby star’ -artists, understand global elite migration and related life changes.

The ‘black hole’ spatiality of ‘being stretched for a long time’ happens to be felt differently from the imagery of the momentous ordeal in the belly of the best. Neither is the ‘black hole rebirth’ perceived by the informants in the same way as the earlier imagined identity boon. As high school students, they just knew, in very general terms, that this migratory journey would be difficult but could not envision what precisely would be required from them. A few people also confess that, if they had had this knowledge in advance, they would have not chosen this road and occupation.

I suspect that such ‘black hole’ experience can be found in other streams of global elite migration, especially among its creative class. This includes migrating top athletes and actors, whose international—Olympic or Hollywood—achievements are often intertwined with cultural myths and legends. And the role of astrogation as a specific type of elite migrant agency is to navigate the labyrinth road for this black hole rebirth to make it less painful.

In fact, no one can protect the elite migrant from the black hole in which s/he is stretched by/between the network sanctions and the desired goal of international stellar success. Those informants who believe they have found their ‘white holes’, or elite transnational spaces of self-invigorating agency, have actually mastered the art of domesticating the space of a black hole—that is, to live with it on a long-term, basis. I understand this type of agency as the ‘protean migrant agency’. In this connection, we may think about the well-known concept of ‘protean career’, which is popular in organizational studies (Hall, 1976; Bennett, 2009; Alfarone & Merlone, 2024). The protean career conveys the ability to step over the boundaries of one’s professional domain and to embrace other career possibilities, including re-qualification and even down-scaling. Thus protean career often invokes a perspective of downward social ability, which is unacceptable for global elite migrants.

My interviews show that, on the contrary to protean career, the protean migrant agency means the ability to cross the boundaries of habitual social and professional capital, try new—more precarious and not always pleasant—activities such as sex-and-body work or high workloads with the purpose to sustain the black hole requirements and thus to achieve an upward social mobility within one’s elite professional domain. The protean migrant agency started to emerge during the informants’ ‘young star’ years, sometimes during their ‘low mass giant’ positioning. Some informants even tried to activate this type of agency even as baby-stars, while climbing up their stellar staircases at home and dealing with various broker-vernaculizers. All informants admit that it was impossible to reach the upper levels of the ‘giant’ status without having practiced and been mastered the protean agency.

As a type of agency, astrogation means navigation through the dark (invisible) space, ability to deal with the unpreparedness of exploring social relations, finding your way through the apparent labyrinth of moves and relations (like in a black hole), ability to be stretched between habitual home practice and new, radical forms of agency, finding invisible global resources through complex rounds of transnational movement (finding one’s ‘brown dwarf oasis’), radically changing one’s methods of dealing with the unknown. Astrogation is the upper level of protean migrant agency. And astrogation is a culturally hybrid mode of migrant agency, an essential part of which is transformative agency.

9.4 Transformative Agency

9.4.1 Main Strategies: MOM and HOME

The transformative agency of my informants, which is associated with positive changes on the macro, meso-, or micro- level can be divided into two types: actions that transform existing cultural norms and practices (or community-transformative agency); and actions that transform their own vision of the world (or self-invigorating agency). Among the most powerful transformative forms of migrant agency, or the most powerful astrogation strategies, are the nodal marriage (including the marriage to an investor from the country of origin, who becomes an important ‘professional’ and ‘migratory’ network resource for the informant and a key element of her/his transnational network) and the ‘glocalization’ strategies at origin (including the ‘travelling companionship’, or ‘brown dwarf oasis’). These strategies create the most robust network ties, which are quite resistant to geopolitical changes such as the post-2022 geopolitics. And in many cases, these two types of the positively transformative migrant agency overlap in their effect upon the informant’s transnational network: the informant interacts with the community, which makes him/her relatively satisfied with his/her life.

From the angle of status change, the informants’ sexuality navigation has been a viable strategy of their astrogation. They used it during various stages of their migratory career, especially during their ‘young-star to red-giant’ transition or during their further ‘giant’ progression. However, it was only felt by them as positively transformative if culminating with the nodal marriage. Otherwise, it was perceived as a practice of precarity—a difficult experience to sustain, although the majority of the informants have developed tolerance to it.

The sexuality navigation with the outcome of marriage (whether to an investor or to a higher level colleague from the opera industry, including the MOM) was self-invigorating in terms of enabling the informant’s movement toward the (upper) ‘red giant’ step or consolidating this position while also protecting the interviewed women from sexual harassment and other precarious forms of sexuality navigation. MOM was a positively constrained agentic practice of cultural transformation on the level of the informant’s professional community: it was inspiring for other unmarried female elite migrant artists, consolidating the new sexuality culture within their professional group on the transnational level. However, this agentic practice was strategically (deliberately) made invisible by the informants on the local community level at both ends. The women involved in such relations admit spinning lies to their local communities back home and also to their husbands’ local communities at destination, thus creating false cultural stereotypes.

The behavior that was reshaping local culture positively was related to the informants’ short-term but regular return trips. Although those transformative projects of their ‘post-Soviet gravity’ were physically tiring and covertly dictated by the logic of their transnational work and elite migrant networks as a source of rare capital accumulation and, consequently, as a wormhole to further elitism, the informants admit enjoying this modest professional collaboration. It was more than incumbency for them. They all note that average-sized and even small theaters back home (scattered through the post-Soviet landscape) are still interested in building up their transnational reputation through the temporary hiring of expat colleagues and mastering new vocal techniques from them, even in spite of the post-2022 conflict. Situated in the periphery of the global opera galaxy or even outside it, these often parochial and ‘culturally cautious’ jobsites are, nevertheless, keen on joining the wheels of more famous galaxies through this small-scale transnational collaboration and temporary return migration.

9.4.2 The ‘Brown Dwarf Oasis’

There are various reasons for my informants to make these home visits: unvoluntary return (like in the case of the Middle Asian singers on government-sponsored programs), experience in a specific role or a protean career attempt of vocal teaching. Except for the unvoluntary returnees, the informants seek to develop a new professional skill through this temporary migration—their trans-galactic capital that they learn from very specific people back home, from their ‘travelling companions’.

According to astronomers, it is important for a star to have its own ‘travelling companion’, or a planet from which it would receive the dark matter—‘a ghostly substance’ that is difficult to detect and that has ‘an enormous influence on stars and galaxies’, the substance that can produce exploding stars and stellar nurseries (Font, 2024). Such planets are called ‘brown dwarfs’, or ‘substellar objects’ that are too small to fuse hydrogen into helium and become the main sequence star but ‘massive enough to fuse other elements and have a life of their own’ (Huston, 2021). Some brown dwarfs emerge directly from the nebula (without being a star), while others from the ‘young star’ phase (Plait, 2019). That is why, they are often unfairly called ‘failed stars’ (ibid).

For many years, brown dwarfs were said to exist in isolation, as if in a cosmic desert (Plait, 2019). However, with the rise of new technologies, astronomers detected that the ‘brown dwarf desert’ is actually the ‘brown dwarf oasis’ because these substellar objects become the ‘close-orbiting companions’ to many luminous stars (Troup et al., 2016; Raddick, 2016). In fact, most stars in our galaxy have a ‘brown dwarf’ travelling companion (ibid).

The informants note that in post-Soviet republics, especially in Russia and Ukraine, there are many excellent voice teachers. To me, they resemble the celestial brown dwarfs—the invisible distantly local professionals who know how to pass the vocal ‘dark matter’, which is the invisible but highly important trans-galactic capital. The informants admit that these people know how to develop the singers’ voice further and even how to restore voices that are broken or damaged by an illness.

Some of them are former singers themselves, who used to be among the ‘low mass red giants’ trying to build their own transnational careers. Others may be just professionally trained vocal coaches or coaching pianists. Some of them are employed in post-Soviet conservatories and music colleges while others are retired and/or self-employed. Many of them do not use social media for self-advertisement and seem to be quite modest local professionals. However, they are skilled producers of the rare professional capital such as specific singing or voice-restoring techniques—the capital, which is invisible but powerful like the cosmic dark matter and which is highly demanded on the world opera job market.

They often act as the first vocal teachers for the informants, who keep returning to them throughout their ‘main-sequence’ global journeys. Alternatively, the informants may find such tutors through various informal channels during their ‘giant’ years. These people are invisible, like ‘brown dwarfs’, and one may have an impression that they actually live in their own desert, away from shining stars and from the global opera. However, almost each informant has such a person in the transnational network as a ‘traveling companion’. More established singers—more massive red giants employed on the A-B level—can afford to arrange the travelling accommodations for these people. More modest giants or young stars travel themselves to visit their brown dwarfs with the purpose to benefit from their services.

Given their unique skills especially in the repairing of broken voices, the importance in these people has grown during the pandemic and the post-pandemic recovery, when the informants were affected by COVID-19 and faced the problem of healing their vocal cords or keeping their voice in a good shape in the conditions of temporary unemployment. Further, the post-2022 geopolitical shift has limited the Russian and Belorussian interviewees’ professional resources at destination, provoking them to seek the ‘brown dwarf’ resources within the post-Soviet space.

The informants admit that it is very difficult to find these people if you do not know them initially and if you do not come from elite musicians’ families. Brown dwarfs were often found by word of mouth. Although elite migrant singers with the same voice structure (or the same Fach)—for example, soprano—prefer not to share this information out of fear of competition. The informants could receive the ‘brown dwarf’ coordinates from colleagues with another Fach: thus sopranos were sometimes referred to brown dwarfs by their role partners who are baritones or by colleagues from Russian and other post-Soviet theaters. Sometimes, these people were found through the Internet, but the informants had to spend long hours of astrogating in search of their location. The informants’ parents were also involved in ‘asking around’. In some cases, the otolaryngologist at origin was making this reference to the informant.

These people as if belong to the two conflicting worlds—the world of the Russian/post-Soviet opera and the world of the global opera. They are officially employed by the networks at origin and, at the same time, serve—though invisibly and covertly but very strongly the informants and their European networks. Although these people are powerful actors in the informants’ transnational galaxies, they remain invisible to the public eye and often to the informants. It is difficult to find them, and searching for them becomes an important part of astrogation—searching for the invisible local to support one’s transnationalism. It is a contribution of the brown dwarf oasis that, despite all geopolitical tensions in the region, the internal migration of post-Soviet singers takes places: for example, a Georgian singer living in Italy has a coach living in Russia or Kazakhstan while a Russian singer employed in Germany has a coach living in Georgia or Armenia.

Each informant has, at least, one vocal coach in Italy. This is because in Italy vocal coaches of a higher level work across narrow specialization lines: some coaches specifically train singers in performing Verdi while others in Puccini. For example, a coloratura soprano who sings Donizetti and Rossini may have a separate coach for each of these two composers. Such coaches are usually recommended to the informants by their networks and by such network actors as the agent or the theater director: when a theater stages a particular performance (such as Turandot), they normally have a list of collaborating coaches who train singers in working with the score of this specific composer (Giacomo Puccini).

Thus the majority of my informants are simultaneously using the services of their informal post-Soviet brown dwarf and the network-assigned Italian coach. These two network actors usually work in collaboration. They are introduced to each other by the informant, and they connect to each other usually online, exchanging their professional opinions. Sometimes, the informant acts as the Russian-Italian (and vice versa) translator. In other cases, the brown dwarf may have some knowledge of Italian, which s/he studied in the conservatory and/or masters now independently. They often work collaboratively to improve the informant’s singing and enable her/him to be competitive on the global level.

This informally constructed spatial bridge can very powerful and robust, sometimes leading to physical contacts. For example, one of my Russian informants was using the services of a very good Ukrainian vocal coach from Odessa, to whom she introduced her Italian tutor. Eventually, both tutors started to co-convene international workshops in Kiev, where the Italian coach travelled. Through this intercultural exchange, her Italian coach has learnt how to help singers perform the Russian music. The global pandemic crisis and the post-2022 events in Ukraine have not disrupted this long-term trans-galactic partnership but have transferred it to the online mode of communication. At the same time, this informant has recently located another brown dwarf in Siberia, where her Italian coach is now planning to go with the purpose to co-organize a new series of workshops for post-Soviet and Italian students in the hybrid mode by bringing together online this new Siberian contact and the Ukrainian colleague. My informants and their brown dwarfs do not only create their own professional oases and engage in transnational teaching-and-learning activities across borders but also help to establish novel practices of transnational entrepreneurship in the extremely hard conditions of shifting geopolitics.

The phenomenon of ‘traveling companionship’ proves to be the most reliable—although a less visible—type of transnationally transformative ‘elite migrant’ agency even within the precarious context of shifting geopolitics. The informants’ ‘brown dwarf’ mentors keep together the expanding space between the world competing opera galaxies and keep them from potential catastrophic irreversible collisions. These invisible transnational professionals provide the scaffolding for the informants’ breaking apart elite networks. The transnational spaces created by these global opera ‘brown dwarfs’ seem to live a robust life of their own, ignoring evident geopolitical pressures. The informants still travel to their post-Soviet mentors and even arrange these mentors to travel to the European sites of their own employment. They thus inevitably benefit from the herein accumulated ‘dark matter’ capital, which they, nevertheless do not want to share with their own competitors. Unlike the operatic coyote-brokers from the informants’ pre-migratory stellar staircase, the brown dwarfs are not vernaculizers, who impose their own interpretation upon the unsophisticated baby-stars. These invisible brown dwarfs are actually the cosmic compasses, who help the maturing informants to astrogate their celestial currents in extremely difficult conditions.

9.5 “I am Dreaming of a White Hole”: The ‘Culture of Lies’

Although some of my informants have reached a certain level of maturity as elite migrant-artists, all of them remain extremely vulnerable as totally dependent on their networks. They are required by the networks to do challenging things, including sex work, body work, singing in physically difficult conditions. Men are more protected because they prepare for this and envision this in advance. They are culturally situated in initially privileged positions of learning business relations and initiating business contacts.

The most vulnerable elite migrants have been the interviewed women. Although the world of opera is feminized in quantitative terms by offering more roles for women because of the structure of their voices, the operatic work is also extremely anti-feminine, or misogynistic. Women are required to deal with their pregnancy, periods and dieting/exercising for body perfection. Although all singers are vulnerable to such banal things as seasonable cold and flu, female voices (such as soprano, which is prevailing in the operatic repertoire) are the most easily damaged by respiratory diseases and also by voice restoring medicines such as steroid injections into vocal cords. Networking, which often includes sexuality navigation, is also challenging especially for women. All these experiences are perceived as very painful when added by problems around migration and integration related to organizing one’s life in a new country or adjusting to a new community.

The major challenges for all informants were their black hole placement and the development of the black hole identity. The most difficult part was to learn to live in the black hole—to domesticate its complex space and to learn to inhabit it—because, once you are there, it is impossible to leave this space without ruining your global elite career. The exit means a permanent interruption of network membership, or the end of the ‘global elite migrant’ status. Smaller (more local) networks and specific people could help the informant enter a bigger black hole and possibly to enable his/her learning to inhabit its spatiality—but not to exit it. Therefore, the informants’ survival through their black hole has been an identity category related to how they have been able to accept the condition of being permanently “stretched” and to reconcile themselves with the new cultural values.

In terms of cultural values, the informants’ migrant agency embraces two intersecting types: the negatively constrained agency (network enforced agency) and the positively constrained agency, or transformative agency (which is network-approved, or network-advised, but still controlled by the informants). Their transformative agency leads to the following cultural transformations.

First, they continuously enlighten, although from above, the post-Soviet public about the cultural and aesthetic attractiveness of opera as a music genre and a lucrative domain. This is evident in their own early-life fascination with the world of global opera and with the idea of elite migration. I cannot speak about the impact of this agentic behavior upon post-Soviet people other than those who themselves eventually become global elite migrants because I have not interviewed them. Neither did I study the social media of every person who is in the ‘fan list’ of my informants. Yet based on the life experiences of the sixty migrant-artists whom I have personally interviewed, I can say that this ‘transformative enlightenment’ agency makes only a temporary effect upon them and probably also upon their fans who want to become global elite migrants.

This cultural effect is short-term because it is based on providing limited information to the public about the reality of global elite migrations, the constructed myth that is shattered as soon as this reality converts into your lived experience. During their ‘nebula-’ and ‘protostar-’ years, the informants were indeed deeply transformed by this culture of enlightenment into elite migrant-artists. However, now they admit that they stopped believing in this myth already during the ‘young star’ phase of their migrant agency. Their disillusionment took place because, with their professional and migratory experience, they started to recognize other, more precarious, aspects of global opera work and the network pressure to do many other, more precarious, things about which they had never known before. I understand this type of agency as ‘network enforced’: the informants are not proud of this agentic strategy, which is dictated by their network as part of their obligation to sustain their globally competitive public image. Disillusioned, they continue to disseminate this ‘enlightenment’ myth, transforming people’s views on global elite migrations.

They actually tell incessant lies to their fans and families back home about the ‘dark’ secrets of their transnational work, continuously reproducing the transnational culture of lies and conspiracy, which is part of their pathological integration. In their ‘baby-star’ years, they themselves were told lies by other singers, including ‘young’ and ‘modest giant stars’, at whom they were looking with respect and even worship. Now they tell these intergenerational lies to their own fans, the majority of whom are baby-stars stars like they used to be a few years ago. offices’?

The process of their ‘fan office’ building is part of the overall lies-and-conspiracy transnational culture disseminated to the masses. The majority of the informants’ fan office members are from their local communities at origin or destination. They can be the former classmates, friends of relatives, husband’s family, often having multiple Facebook accounts under different names. Some of them can be paid by the informant while others may have their own means to travel as tourists and receive concert- and show- vouchers from the informant as a pay for the fan office service.

In this way the informants form a transnational community of opera lovers where the borderline between fans and professional singers can be blurred on the earlier stages of migrant agency and where many opera fans actually seek to learn from their transnational idols while preparing for global elite migrations.

The reasons for not telling the truth about oneself can be different. First, the informants do not share details of the ‘dark’ things they did (such as sex work, MOM relations, patronage and stellar staircase ascendance) because of the fear that their network nodes may somehow learn about this informational exchange and terminate their network membership.

Second, they believe that, by sharing sensitive information about invisible activities that many people are still willing to master, they will enable their own competitors in the global opera.

Third, they are afraid to damage their own public image of the (local)celebrity and thus to change the course of their glocalization. The research conducted by Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou (2017) shows that highly skilled migrants are often perceived by local people back home as ‘celerity’ bringing the positive element of globalization and global culture into their local lives—that is, as agents of glocalization connecting the global and the local and reshaping the local culture through the global cultural inventory.Footnote 1 ‘How could I possibly dismantle this belief in a fairy tale!’ say the majority of my informants.

‘What would my mother think about me?’ ‘What would my fans and next-door neighbors think about who I am?’ ‘A star who is also a sex worker, the woman of a bisexual man—a trafficked diva and a pervert, in other words?’ As the occupational psychologists Jordhus-Lier and Coe (2023: 941) would say, in such cases, it is better to make the shady aspect of one’s career ‘strategically invisible’. The constant fear of being suddenly perceived by their worshipping community of fans or co-nationals back home (including their former classmates and childhood friends) as a pervert or a black-hole victim is much stronger than the fear of the black hole itself.

This fear of disclosing the truth is shaped by their network as such. Scholars of organizational studies argue that elite professional networks of creative industries often make their members advocate specific cultural values as part of their agency (Herod, 2001; Hastings, 2016; Holloway et al., 2019; Jordhus-Lier & Coe, 2023). And the transnational network of my informants always dictates to them how they should feel and present themselves at both ends. As a result, they are not integrated anywhere—neither at destination nor at origin because their ‘culture of lies’ is akin to pathological integration. When they lie to their local communities, they themselves actually construct their own cosmic iceberg of disintegration. They focus only on the tip, or visual representation, and deliberately hide the globe, into which they themselves continuously bump.

9.6 Bridges Across the Black Hole

This book thus shows that elite migrant-artists (as illuminated by the case of my informants) live as if in a black hole. In this reference, astronomers would probably say that a black hole may not be a bad thing in the long run: it produces stellar nurseries and gravity that keeps our universe together. However, for the informants, it is a very difficult condition, although they always search for ways to embrace it to some extent. It is mostly the idea of incessant mobility that penetrates the ‘stretching’ logic of their black hole—mobility that disrupts the desired lifestyle and the tranquility of life; mobility that is not always good for the singer’s voice and integration; mobility that is, nevertheless, important for their visibility. Their elite visibility also creates the culture of lies and conspiracy, which is another part of their ‘black hole condition’.

However, they are creative class migrants. Their constrained agency is, therefore, hybrid—that is, based on the four different bridges of hybrid cultural exchange between Europe and the post-Soviet space.

As constrained or enforced agents, they build what I would like to call the Hollywood Bridge, or Comet Bridge. They enlighten—yet invariably deceive—ordinary post-Soviet people. This can be compared with the Hollywood effect, when the Hollywood filmmakers shoot movies about America that are intended not for Americans but for the naïve and unaware global world outside America (Ney, 2004, 2011). This cultural production undoubtedly fosters people’s keen interest in the USA, which is then often followed by disintegration and disillusionment when such people migrate and, as migrants, encounter this culture in real life (ibid). The Hollywood Bridge is a persistent enlightenment about something very attractive that, nevertheless, does not exist the way it is presented. This cultural deception is also akin to a comet, whose beautiful tail cannot be used as a bridge because it consists of dust and nothing solid, while the deliberately hidden nucleus remains unknown and, consequently, too hard to manage when encountered. This is a two-directional but very instable bridge with quite dangerous trafficking.

Second, we can see another bridge of cultural conspiracy—the unidirectional bridge based on the conspiracy culture of concocting ethnic ties for the purposes of legality and naturalization. This bridge is built by men artists who use the corrupt ‘Soviet/Russian’ means to achieve the liberal western goals.

At the same time, my informants (who are also transformative agents) build the Segmented Elite Bridge when they foster the transnational inter-sectoral business (bridging the culture of music and financing) through investor marriage. It is a solid two-directional bridge, although of limited use as intended only for wealthy people.

And the apogee of their transformative cultural agency is the Intergalactic/Networking Bridge, which is called the ‘Brown Dwarf Oasis’ and built each time the informants engage in internal migrations and in the reproduction of the post-Soviet space through them. The idea of the post-2022 intergalactic conflict is about a complete reconfiguration (or isolation) of the traditional post-Soviet space as a space of Russian culture and Great Russian Opera School. While these internal migrations across the ‘brown dwarf oasis’ actually keep the integrity of this post-Soviet opera space and its position in the overall global opera galaxy.

The informants thus facilitate the two transnational entrepreneurial projects: the ‘investor spouse’ hybrid (inter-sectoral) enterprise, and the ‘brown dwarf’ hybrid cultural (trans-galactic) enterprise. Both enterprises bring in new actors (stars and planets) into existing elite opera networks (galaxies), transforming professional cultures within the global opera industry through the innovative mix of glocalization and transnational (sometimes multi-sectoral) business.

In this way, the informants impact upon geopolitics through their home visits and especially through their (‘brown dwarf’) relations with their old and new post-Soviet mentors. They also refashion sexuality-based stereotypes and family patterns but on the level of their transnational professional community that is located in Europe. Finally, they reshape transnational business practices that take place in their countries of origin: through the ‘investor’ marriage, they bring home--based businesses to Europe and connect them with the world of opera, introducing a new perspective on transnational family business and family migration.

The mechanisms of ‘sexuality navigation’ in the form of legal marriage and ‘brown dwarf oasis’ prove to create the most robust transnational ties. Even most befriended agents and patrons may go away, which is especially evident in the condition of the post-2022 shifting geopolitics.

On the contary, the nodal spouse stays with the informant, providing for the maximum protection from the shifting geopolitics and elite network dynamics. The ‘nodal marriage’ strategy provides for the least painful ‘black hole’ exit or ‘modifications; while the strategy of ‘travelling companionship’ serves a different networking function—to provide for rare and invisible trans-galactic capital and herein a covert wormhole to the network but not the protection from its black hole.

9.7 Epilogue: What Happened to the Brown Dwarf?

Testimonies of my informants can make one feel sad about the tragic fate of a brown dwarf—a ‘black hole’ survivor, who was once full of ambitions and great expectations before losing his/her migrant agency potential. It is easy to think about this phenomenon as the fate of a young star who has never reached the main sequence (“in-career”) phase and has eventually turned into a futureless substellar object. If through the prism of astronomy, our Milky Way Galaxy has billions of them; in fact, more than other types of star. Astronomy explains their formation as a relatively simple process: they just do not have enough resources to generate light and to become a red giant. A ‘brown dwarf’ migrant-artist may, however, have a different story to tell. And it could be a moralizing story of his/her agency-network nexus.

For example, Polina did not convert into the brown dwarf immediately upon her graduation from the conservatory. Before falling down from the global opera sky, she used to be a red giant for a short period of time. And her ‘red giant’ phase was overlapping with the unfinished ‘nebula’ condition. Although she had shaped as a gifted professional singer, she still remained, for a long time, very naïve, nebula-like naïve, and unaware of various star-formation processes taking place in the galaxies she was trying to astrogate. She did not see—nor was she trying to understand—the nuances of networking. She was not able to maintain the positive agency-network nexus, or the ability to manipulate the network, which is essential for a (red) giant, for someone who wants to build the career of an international singer, or an elite migrant-artist. While my informants have appropriated the self-identification category of ‘being en-carriera’, this condition should be called ‘to be within-network’ rather than ‘to be in-career’. As they themselves explain, to be ‘en-carriera’ means to be demanded by many theaters and agents, to be respected by influential brokers and to be desired by patrons. The career of an international opera singers—the career of a successful migrant-artist—is actually the formation of his/her agency-network nexus.

Elite migrant networks are always restrictive, and this feature of elite networks—their intrinsic and unavoidable closure—is embedded in the Milky Way metaphor. The one who was rejected by the network founder Hero was actually a privileged person, the child of Zeus himself, the child of the god. Still such a god-blessed person was excluded from the network for very subjective, intimate reasons—just because Hero did not like him: jealous of her cheating husband, she transferred that envy to his illegitimate son. This unspoken—difficult to articulate—something is always present in elite networks. While the work of agency aims to capture such hidden rules and to structure the way to respond to them. These extremely difficult, often intimate and subtle relations invariably underpinned the global elite networks of my informants, whereas their agency was not always capable of paving its way through network manipulations. The reason was either the extremely exhausting nature of that agentic work or their prolonged ‘nebula’ naivety—their inability to envision, plan, modify or simply to learn basic networking rules such as establishing relations with the “right” stars and star-makers. It was their inability to astrogate.

The ‘agency-network’ nexus is about mastering the network rules and planning and finding your own way through the network, considering the impact of such factors as patron’s personal taste, geopolitical situation and network’s geopolitical preferences. It is important to remember that elite migrant networks are not only the products of business relations but also of geopolitics. This can be illuminated by the example of Anna Netrebko, to whom I continuously make a reference in this book. She has, in fact, inspired me by her iconic example of great singer with a beautiful voice and strong image of the epoch and of the expanding post-Soviet space.

At the same time, she is an embodiment of perseverance and finesse in the agency-network nexus. A god-blessed artist, she was for more than twenty years included in the operatic Milky Way at its different ends. She was well networked within and in-between the best world theaters of both the pre-2022 Russia and the West, connecting the Mariinka (St Petersburg) with the New York Met and Vienna Opera. However, one, day, she found herself expelled from all segments of this rapidly splitting galaxy. As shown in mass media around 2022–2023, many people, including her former fans, at both ends were obviously expecting her to develop as a substellar object or a star remnant, which luckily never happened. And here we can ask if her survival through the falling apart and reshaping inter-galactic network was a good luck or if it was the sophisticated work of her agency as a global-super-elite-migrant and a super-giant artist.

Her famous statement ‘If necessary, I will sit not only on two chairs but also on three chairs’ was more than a cliché in response to being accused of political instability and attempts to please both Russia and the West in the informational war milieu. I see her agreement ‘to sit on multiple chairs’ as the determination of a migrant-artist to engage in a lot of agentic work with the purpose to carefully explore the changing networking rules and to manipulate new network sanctions with the purpose to enter multiple operatic galaxies. While being part of multiple operatic galaxies is a normal condition for an elite artist, which should not be violated by any geopolitical developments. She is an example of not only diva who wants to extend her starry career but of extremely hardworking elite migrant who seeks to achieve the agency-network balance.

Another thing is that, in practice, this balance is very difficult to achieve because there are always various factors affecting network structure/membership, while migrant-artists have may different degrees of tolerance to their impact. Some may feel relatively comfortable to practice sexuality navigation or to be involved in geopolitical games, whereas others may find these activities of astrogation or learning new networking techniques quite disturbing. The agency-network nexus is a difficult issue to discuss and astrogation, which aims to accomplish this nexus, is a challenging process to engage in. That is why, my informants often used the ‘third person’ narratives, talking as if about their friend. However, this is what makes their elite-migrant trajectories and perceptions of career- and life- success differ. They came from different backgrounds and initially had different resources for agentic learning.

The majority of my informants came from non-musicians’ families. Some were lucky to have their parents working in business circles who could provide substantial monetary support as well as basic ‘streetwise’ advice on how to survive in a new environment. While others had to learn to astrogate at destination on their own and from scratch which was not easy. However, not many of their fans may actually know this.

It may indeed appear to many ordinary people that global elite migrants such as opera singers have everything as given: unproblematic integration, easy and flexible networking and unrestricted agency. On the contrary, this book has shown that their integration is often an illusion and a fake, even for those who are employed in European opera houses of the ‘A’ and ‘B’ -levels. Thus all informants who belong to the ‘A/B’ employment group (as described in Chap. 5) admit frequently using the above-noted ‘integration lies’ and ‘integration conspiracy’ as their agentic astrogation strategies.

Their stories show that, disintegrated, they may pretend to be integrated, in order to survive. Their agency is often structured by unspoken yet firmly fixed network requirements for their mundane participation in transnational activities such as sexual favors and provocative political campaigns, which they themselves may detest. Their network membership is thus difficult to attain; and when granted, it proves to be extremely fragile, unstable and dependent on various powerful people they have to please all the time.

Their global elite networking is based on transnational connections with powerful nodes both at destination and origin. That is why, they maintain connectivity with their countries of origin, where they search for career resources including vocal education and professional patronage. And an integration mistake in one country may therefore cost them their global network and transnational career. In many cases, their global elite work can be compared with a black hole, a space that first entices but eventually entraps them with severe network obligations and career obstructions. Still some find their way to survive through such a blackhole and even to benefit by its membership because they manage to somehow reassess their values.

My perspective on their life and work of their migrant agency is thus symbolic interactionist: I recognize the relational complexity within elite networks and the importance of symbolism in their perception of this complexity. The metaphorical framework of ‘astronomy’ reflects and illuminates what Herbert Mead (1934) defines as ‘symbolic interactional order’—which is the symbolic order within their elite networks, the order that is difficult to overpower and even to master. Through this framework, we can see how symbolic their emergence through all these difficult spaces and relations is—that is, inspired by the imagined upper goal and false images. This interpretive and symbolic interactionist framework allows to explore how people like my informants are being affected by diverse societal forces on the macro-, meso- or micro- level of interaction including, for example, local brokers and geopolitical shifts. Their transnational social space is indeed a very complex and highly interactive symbolic order—that is, a dynamic and self-reproducing isomorphic system of humans relations, personal aspirations, cultural values and geopolitical and individual actors—in which it is not easy to survive.

This interpretive research and the sociological imagination (metaphorical thinking) it has enabled intertwine with ideas from the field of symbolic interactionism by showing how, for my informants, some powerful and self-appropriated symbols can speak on behalf of other symbols (Mead, 1934)—how, for example, the symbolism of natural forces can resonate with symbolic meanings attached to people they encounter, social relations they build and cultural values they carry (ibid). For example, a particular kind of ‘star’ [e.g.: ‘protostar’, ‘nebula’ or ‘red giant’] becomes the symbol of another symbolic meaning such as international recognition, professional membership, life success, (un)desired lifestyle, so-called ‘privileged’ mobility and temporariness and elite network membership, or positioning within the shifting yet isomorphic transnational social space. And ‘astrogation’ is symbolic of the migrant-artist’s attempt to break through the omnivorous spatiality of a ‘black hole’. While the ‘black hole’ itself symbolizes the ‘ordeal’ of elite migration, which, unlike the ordinary ‘belly of the beast’, has no exit. The ‘black hole’ metaphor is to enable a subtler understanding of the interaction between the two kinds of their constrained migrant agency: enforced agency and transformative agency. Although seemingly different, they belong to the same hybrid cultural form—the ‘black hole’ agency, or the network-dictated agency.

With the root metaphors of ‘astrogation’ and ‘black hole’, the metaphorical framework of this book allows to see the modus operandi within elite migrant networks, including the work of central actors (such as instable geopolitical leaders and big cultural producers as well as European brokers at destination) and also more peripheral yet robust transnational galaxy builders (such as ‘brown dwarfs’ and local vernaculizer-brokers at origin). This metaphorical performative approach to migrant agency allows to visualize, from the interpretive sociological perspective, the epistemology of transnationalism and social networking, or the complexity of human relations within elite networks, by bringing together fragile people and their perception of powerful forces.

My last encounters with these migrant-artists took place online in the middle of the post-2022 global military conflict, which has been adversely affecting the whole ethos of global opera. Therefore, it is unclear at the moment how they will manage to survive through this expanding crisis. Ambitious, neurotic, career-crazed, outrageous yet often falling down from the sky because of their naivety—and hoping again for integration and career success in the West…This is perhaps how we should remember them while listening to their sometimes interrupted arias of global elite migration.