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Join our Skills Sharing Workshops!

Come join us!! 

We are thrilled to once again be offering our Skills Sharing Workshops to promote artists’ skills development including knowledge of opera and working with young people thanks to our recent funding from Arts Council England.

This May we are delighted to be partnering again with Southwark Playhouse following our successful collaboration on these workshops in 2021 to offer drama and music practitioners a workshop on opera and our process of delivering opera workshops in primary schools and how their skills may be transferable to working in opera. And following this success, we are also partnering with Opera Holland Park to offer a workshop to opera singers who may have limited experience in facilitating workshops for young people and how their opera skills can be used in this area. We encourage artists of all levels to apply and we hope that the workshops will be a fun and useful experience in developing artists’ skillsets as well as enabling us to meet new practitioners to work with in the future! 

We recognise that opera is traditionally a white middle class artform and the lack of diversity in the arts is one of the sector’s most important issues. We strongly believe not only that opera is for everyone but that our artists should be representative of the South London areas in which we work. As such, we warmly encourage artists of colour to apply.

“Thank you so much for such an inspiring afternoon. Thank you for making it so warm and inclusive, and making us all feel welcome wherever we had come from.”

Workshops are FREE to attend but spaces are limited so if you’re interested please sign up here for Southwark Playhouse and here for Opera Holland Park by 19th April or contact us for more details.

We look forward to meeting you!

 

 

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Singing, dancing & sharing ideas for Street Opera!

Following our session with the brilliant Roehampton Base Youth Club as part of the adaptation process of our new street opera, we also visited the Elders Group at Katherine Low Settlement to share our work and pick their brains! The lovely Elspeth Wilkes led some vocal warm ups with the group, accompanied Claire Wild singing a few numbers from opera, musical theatre and well known songs to get everyone singing along and we showed filming and discussed how we rewrite and adapt operas for high street performances. Elspeth even got the group singing an opera chorus and some of the group joined in dancing! We also discussed some of the problems of adapting Elixir of Love for London life today and the group had lots of brilliant ideas for solving them – thank you for your help! Another brilliant session as part of our adaptation and we can’t wait to be back later in the process to share some of the scenes we’ve created. Meanwhile Jo needs to get her head down in the libretto and Leo is hard at work on those dots….

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Drama games, dazzling ideas and descants…

As part of the adaptation process to re-write The Elixir of Love into a modern English street opera for London life today, the team this year are also working with two local community groups who we wanted to engage further in the process of our work.

Previously when we’ve done our street performances at and around Roehampton Base Youth Club we’ve had such fantastic responses from the brilliant young people that we thought it would be a good idea to visit them at a much earlier stage of the process. And what an amazing time we had with the group! SO much laughter and SO many brilliant ideas from all of the young people and staff. Nadege led drama games, Leo played the bassoon, Claire sang and led vocal warm ups, and we discussed The Elixir of Love and ideas for who the characters would be and how the story might work in London today. The group were just as brilliant at Eastenders Zip Zap Boing as helping us sort out some of the story’s problems! Thank you so much to everyone involved, to the brilliant Roehampton Base team for organising, to Arts Council England for funding – and we absolutely can’t wait to be back very soon!

 

 

 

 

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Announcing the Cast of Carmen!

We are delighted to announce the cast of Carmen:

Felicity Buckland – Carmen (Arcola Theatre)

Felicity Buckland

Felicity trained at the RNCM and on English National Opera’s Opera Works programme.

Recent solo appearances include Kasturbai, Glass Satyagraha for ENO, Wellgunde Wagner The Rhinegold for Birmingham Opera and Nicklausse, Offenbach The Tales of Hoffmann for Kentish Opera. Previous ENO highlights include cover roles in The Valkyrie, The Mask of Orpheus (Birtwistle), Orpheus in the Underworld, Carmen, and Olivier-Award winning Porgy and Bess. Elsewhere she has sung the title roles in Carmen (Kentish Opera) and La Cenerentola (High Time Opera); Rosina The Barber of Seville (Opera South) Rossweisse Die Walküre (Grange Park Opera); Olga Eugene Onegin (Opera Up Close, Opera South East, Mid Wales Opera (cover)); Dorabella Così Fan Tutte (Baseless Fabric Theatre); Cherubino The Marriage of Figaro, and 3rd Lady The Magic Flute (both Opera Up Close). She is a regular extra chorister for The Royal Opera House, ENO and Opera North.

Felicity is in demand for solo oratorio, music education projects and consort/session work, and is delighted to be a regular part of Baseless Fabric’s Learning and Participation Projects. Read more

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Lunchtime Opera: Different Perspectives

Recently we took our Die Fledermaus adaptation into local community centres so that elderly lunch club groups can hear a professional opera singer and pianist perform live and chat to them about what it’s like to work as a professional musician.

We asked our session leaders to tell us what their favourite moment was: Read more

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2018, what a year…

What a year 2018 was for Baseless Fabric! We began the year with the thrilling news that we were the first recipient of the Wimbledon Foundation’s prestigious new Arts and Community Engagement Fund for our new street opera project Die Fledermaus!

This project, with the additional support of Arts Council England, Merton Council and the Samuel Gardner Memorial Trust, encompasses the creative adaptation of an opera for the high street, the free professional performances, workshops for both schools and elderly lunch clubs and two school parallel productions! So while the project has similarities to our previous street operas Drifting Dragons and Cosi Fan Tutte, it is also bigger and better than ever! Read more

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School kids considering a career in opera!

Holy Trinity Primary School Workshop

A few weeks ago we had a great time running workshops for various primary and secondary schools across Merton and Wandsworth teaching Years 5 & 6 about opera as part of our Die Fledermaus project.

We asked our brilliant workshop leaders James, Elliott and Danae to tell us a bit more about how they went….. Read more

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Die Fledermaus School Workshops

Students workshop at St Marks Academy

As part of our exciting Die Fledermaus project we are running a series of workshops in primary and secondary schools across Merton & Wandsworth this July. These workshops teach young people about opera giving many of them an insight into an art form they might not otherwise encounter. They learn about what opera is and who is involved in creating it; the story and characters of Die Fledermaus and our modern adaptation; they learn to sing and act out the characters of a section of the opera themselves; and they get to hear a professionally trained opera singer sing right next to them and sing with her!

We can’t wait for our three talented workshop leaders to get working with all these schools in a few weeks. Meanwhile, you can learn a bit more about them here: Read more

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Announcing our Cosi Fan Tutte R&D Cast

We are proud to announce our singers for the Cosi Fan Tutte street opera R&D. 

The Cast

Felicity Buckland – Dorabella

Felicity Buckland

Felicity trained at the RNCM, and on ENO’s Opera Works programme. She studies privately with Mary Plazas.

Her operatic appearances include Angelina La Cenerentola (High Time Opera); Cherubino The Marriage of Figaro (Opera Up Close); Cupid Orpheus in the Underworld and Ida/cover Orlovsky Die Fledermaus (Opera Danube); Una, Kiss Me, Figaro! (Merry Opera) and Mercedes Carmen (Co-Opera Co). She has also spent seasons in the chorus at Opera Holland Park, as a chorus mentor for Birmingham Opera, and at English Touring Opera, where she also sang the role of Mama in Dust Child, a specially-written opera for children with special educational needs.

Felicity is in demand for solo oratorio, and performs and records extensively as a professional consort singer, including appearing on Eric Whitacre’s Grammy Award-winning choral disc, Light and Gold. She is also a singing tutor and experienced choral animateur, leading workshops for a variety of groups of people.

Felicity is currently preparing the role of Rossweisse in Die Walküre for Grange Park Opera, in their brand new theatre at West Horsley Place. Read more

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Announcing our new production

Following the success of our new Merton street opera Drifting Dragons last year, we are delighted to announce our 2017 street opera production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte. It’s a story about love and friendship, cheating, and testing the one you love. Both funny and moving, we’re sure you’ll love following our characters rather complicated love lives taking place on the streets of Merton!

Drifting Dragons (2016)

Our performances will be completely free and unticketed in a variety of places in Merton town centres high – popping up in cafes, pubs, supermarkets, libraries and perhaps at the bus stop! We hope you’ll follow our story and hear the beautiful music as you’re going about your normal life. Perhaps you can do the weekly shop and see some opera at the same time?!

We’re again partnering with Merton Music Foundation to offer local schools complimentary workshops teaching young people about opera, and with organisations such as the New Horizon Centre and Merton & Morden Guild to engage local elderly people with this fantastic story of love, confusion and betrayal. We’ll keep you updated with what we get up to as we go along. Read more