Blog

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!

 

 

Blog

Composing Drifting Dragons

Drifting Dragons outside M&S. Photo: Oliver.john Works

Drifting Dragons outside M&S. Photo: Oliver.john Works

It was a daunting prospect. Write an opera? I had written a considerable amount of instrumental music and songs for theatre before but never an opera. This would be something new.

Those who have been following the Drifting Dragons journey will know that it began life around a year ago. Joanna Turner, Artistic Director of Baseless Fabric, wanted to create a promenade opera about the lives of Londoners. She was looking for a composer and I nervously but eagerly raised my hand across cyberspace. Before long we had agreed to work together and were interviewing local people in Merton (Baseless Fabric’s home borough) about their views on opera, as well as finding out about their lives and memories, which would ultimately feed into the story of Drifting Dragons. The theme for the opera soon established itself as friendship and how over time it can be rocked by setbacks and challenges. I set to work writing the libretto and music for a short work-in-progress performance at the Wimbledon Theatre at the end of January 2016. Read more